Thoughts on Blogging

If you found my first blog on Facebook yesterday, I'm sure you noticed my note that I never thought I'd be a blogger. Starting in middle school or maybe even before, I started keeping a journal, but I have long realized that the thoughts in my journal are far from profound. There have been challenging times in my life, but for the most part, these experiences have not seemed blog-worthy. To be perfectly honest, even three weeks ago I would have said that you would never find me blogging about my life. I realized that the experience of losing my daughter was something that I could blog about, but I simply couldn't imagine sharing such a private, emotional experience on the internet. I have changed my mind (obviously!). Here's why.

Within days of Faith's birth, I received no less than three suggestions that I contact a woman who had lost her daughter in March and had started a blog. If you're curious about her blog you can find it here: http://hardermagic.blogspot.com/. I started reading her story and realized that much of what she said in her early posts resonated with my own experience. She is very honest in her blogging, and when I started reading her blog, I couldn't imagine being that honest with people who care about me, much less with strangers who might find my blog by chance. I have been profoundly touched by R's blog, so much so that I suddenly found myself wanting to share my own story. I hope that by sharing through this blog I might reach out to someone else in my situation, that I can help those around me understand my struggles, and that I might find healing.

R's blog is not the only one by far that I have found over the last weeks that has been helpful. Another blog, found here http://www.dazeddad.com/, tells the story of loss from a father's perspective. The author of this blog is also a United Methodist pastor. His blog both echos many of my feelings and also has helped me understand my husband's experience better. This is a perspective that often gets lost and forgotten, and I know that in my own grief it's easy to forget that M lost his daughter, too, that while I felt her move within me, he never experienced her in the same way and that creates an entirely different kind of grief.

I hope that you'll keep reading even when my posts tend to focus on the mundane rather than the profound as they undoubtedly will. I have list of post ideas that will at least get us through a few weeks, things that have been rumbling around in my head and are finally in a form that I feel comfortable sharing. So, along those lines, here are a few both profound and mundane things I have learned in the last four weeks.

• There are entirely too many parents out there blogging about the loss of their children. Yes, we live in a broken world. Yes, the brokenness of our world means that there will always be parents who lose their children. That doesn't mean we have to be okay with it. God can walk with us in our anger, frustration, confusion, and disappointment!
• Prayer works in ways that are impossible to understand. Whether I'm present with you or not, your prayers are keeping me together, so keep praying! Even on days when things appear to be going well on the surface, I still need to know that people are praying, so don't stop telling me!
• Hugs, shoulder squeezes, any simple touch, all these are great ways to communicate to me what you feel when you don't know what to say. Honestly, I don't know what to say either. We don't have words for this experience. Hugs really do help!
• Hope is hard to kill. Yes, this ironic since my name happens to be Hope, but I mean this on a much deeper level than my own physical body. It may currently be a shriveled, sad-looking shell of what used to exist in my heart, but I still have hope. Even when I feel my worst and my face feels chapped from crying, I still have hope that life will get better, that joy will come, that I will be able to listen to stations other than NPR on the radio without getting emotional, that I will once again be able to plan for the future, and that one day there will be another pregnancy with a happier ending.