(127) Getting caught up...

So it has already started... getting behind. I do have a good excuse though. I went to Austin this weekend to see The Nutcracker with my mom, husband, step-daughter, and my mom's best friend.

So here are my reverbs from the last 3 days.

December 3: Moment
Pick one moment during which you felt most alive this year. Describe it in vivid detail (texture, smells, voices, noises, colors).
(Author: Ali Edwards)

Hmmm... Most alive, ehh? I am going to skip this one.



December 4: Wonder
How did you cultivate a sense of wonder in your life this year?
(Author: Jeff Davis)

I can honestly say that I have never tried to "cultivate" wonder. But this year, it really kind of just happened. I am expecting at the end of this month. With our first daughter, I never got to experience the movement and growth that "first-timers" get to experience. So with this pregnancy, I was able to feel the first movements, the first hiccups, the first of all lot of things. From the beginning, every time this girl moved I was just in awe. The more my belly has grown I have just been amazed at how my body can grow another human being. Being pregnant, this pregnant, still is something of a mystery to me. I am just amazed that women's bodies are able to do this. That the human body is able to grow a being from two cells into a fully functional biological mechanism.

It's like cell phones. I think they are the neatest things, but I am still not sure how exactly they work.



December 5: Let go.
What (or whom) did you let go of this year? Why?
(Author: Alice Bradly)

I do realize that since the beginning of this assignment, that most of my answers have had to do with pregnancy or loss. But that is what this year has been about. In that, I have learned to let go of my misconceptions about what it means to be a mom. Not that I really thought you could only have living children to be a mom, or that I really thought about the definition of the word. But since our loss, I have had a good deal of time to ponder what a mom truly is. A mom isn't just a women who has children that she takes care of here on earth. A mom is any woman who has earth-bound or heaven-bound children. You can be a mom if you have suffered a loss, be it at full-term or at 4 weeks pregnant. Just because a woman can't feed, read to, teach, or love on their child, does not mean that they are any less of a mom. And the love a babyloss mom feels for their child is just as great as the love a mom of a earth-bound child feels... minus the ability to actually physically touch their child.

I still struggle with how the word "mom" relates to me. It's hard to sometimes think of myself as a mom because our daughter didn't come home with us and the medical world classified my loss as a miscarriage even though I was so far along at 19 weeks (a stillbirth occurs at 20 weeks or more gestation). But I am a mom. I was a mom the moment I found out I was pregnant. And do is every other women... you are a mom at the moment of conception.