New Life: A Respite

Last Thursday my youngest daughter gave birth to a baby boy. And for a few days now I have not been anything but a grandmother in love with her new grandson. I will get back to other things in awhile, but for the moment, they bounce off me as I am enveloped in the happiness of new love. People want to engage me about things going on with the search for you, Michaela, and I want to shrug them off. Leave me alone. Let me have my island of pure joy please. I don't want to hear about searches or digs. I don't want to hear about death. I only want to embrace life. Just for a moment. Please.

This is not to say, Michaela, that you have been forgotten in any of this. You were even there in the labor and delivery room, as I suffered along with my daughter through an unmedicated birth, as I wondered if you had given birth in the time you have been gone, and I grieved that if you had, I had not been able to be there to hold your hand or rub your back, as I was doing with your youngest sister, the one you have never met.

But for now, for this moment, I hope you don't mind if I take a few days off from the grief, from the scratching and clawing my way through the frustration of trying to find you. I hope you don't mind that for awhile I will cast off the blanket of sadness and I will fully embrace the joy of this season of new life. I will get back to the business of finding you, but this is like finding a small garden with a padded bench on which to rest in the middle of a decades long climb up a mountain.

I love you, Michaela. I love you forever. Wherever you are, rejoice with us, and with little baby Theo. Life affirms life.

mom