Catching Up

It’s true. The road to hell is paved with good intentions. When I started this blog, and the blog My Franco American life, I was on maternity leave and I was healing from losing Kerian. The scar from my C-section healed far sooner than the scars on my heart. Then I went back to work, and in taking care of myself, my job, Mister 10,000 Volts (Mr. 10Kv), and Pierre-Francois (PF), and our home, I lost my momentum and stopped blogging.

Oh, and then somewhere in between my last blog post and living my life, I became hellbent to have another baby. Obsessed, really. PF was on board with it, and I have to admit that my desire to have another baby became a need. Then it became my second job. Everyone in my house wanted that baby. Mr. 10Kv would ask me if I was going to have another baby. He would put his little hands on my belly and ask me if I was pregnant yet with “our baby” (meaning, the whole family’s baby). I was old...44 years old, so it took IVF therapy to make it happen, and after too many IVF injections to count, I finally became pregnant with Sunshine Boy (SB). He will be two next month, and he truly lives up to his nickname here on my blog. It is a pleasure to have the joy of a little child in the house again, for all of us. Mr. 10Kv is a little daddy to SB, and PF and I have a unique perspective on parenting that now makes us more patient than I believe we would have otherwise been.

But Kerian is not forgotten. PF and I think of him every day, at least once a day. On August 30 this year he would have turned 5 years old. We would have been planning his entry into kindergarten. We would have been deciding things like, “should he start kindergarten this year?” Or “should we let him do another year of preschool and send him to kindergarten next year?” I’ll be honest. I still feel robbed of the chance to make such choices. I’ve gone back to therapy, this time with a different counselor than the one I saw after Kerian died, and before Kerian’s birthday on August 10, I cried for almost the entire 50-minute session. So my great aunt Betty was right; “the pain never goes away, but it does get softer.” She should know, because God bless her, one of her own precious, beloved babies lies in a cemetery in Southern Indiana.

This is an odd place to stop a blog post, but it’s 6:10am and time for me to go upstairs and get ready for work. If you are reading this post because you found the books on the shelf at the hospital, because your child is in the PICU, then know that my heart goes out to you and your family, and especially to your beloved child. Stay strong. I hope you get the happy ending. And most of all, whatever your experience, I wish you peace.