The situation we are in really causes you, on a daily basis, to take a long hard look at everything around you. Kaleb and I spend most of our days sitting here at the house together, cuddling when we can (some times it’s just to hard for him to be in any position other than laying flat on his side) and that leaves me with A LOT of time to think. I’ve been looking at my life and at how I got to where I am today and I started thinking about a jigsaw puzzle. It’s kind of like a 5000 piece puzzle you get, you open the box, pour it out on the card table and start looking for the corners. Once you get those in place you make the rest of the border and then start filling in the middle. It seems like I keep getting that part done then the mean kid down the street comes and kicks the table over sending pieces flying everywhere. I find myself having to pick up all the pieces and starting over again. Only now, several of the pieces are missing so I’ll never get it fully together, which means the puzzle no longer looks the same, there will always be holes in it.
Think about when you were growing up, maybe this applies more for girls than boys, but it seems like from the time we are teenagers we spend a large portion of our life looking for love. Some people are lucky enough to find it at a young age and others not so much. But I am here to tell you that you do not know the true meaning of love until you have your first child. You love your family, your friends, your spouse but nothing comes close to the love you feel for your children - it’s a different kind of bond, unconditional and unfaltering from day one. No matter what they do throughout their life, you will always love them as much as you did the first day you held them. You really can’t say that about anyone else you’ll have in your life. When I had Christopher, I thought my heart would burst with all the love I felt and watching him grow into a young man stepping out into the world was a real eye opener for me. I always knew he’d grow up and have a life of his own but I was not prepared for it when it started happening, when I stopped being “mommy“ and become “mom“.
When we found out we were having Kaleb, I had already experienced some of that little boy, pulling away from mommy so I thought I’d be better prepared with Kaleb for being able to let go when the time came, and maybe I would have if that time were to come 20 years from now - but that is not an option. I’m faced with losing both of my children at the same time, one to life - his own life, and one to death. My jigsaw puzzle is missing a lot of pieces, it’s no longer looks the way I thought it would and I don’t even want to continue putting it together, I think for now, I’m just going to leave it on the card table and maybe some day, I'll try to put the pieces back together. For right now, I’m just going to hold on to a couple of those pieces, as tight as I can, for as long as God will let me.