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Acorns

 It came on my birthday.  A posthumous gift of sorts.  I gingerly touched the smooth brown surfaces and ran my finger across the pointy tops.  Makiah's little fingers had gingerly collected this bag of tiny brown acorns.  She loved "tiny fings."  The last time I picked her up from a play date with her best buddies, she cried as we drove away from their house.  "I forgot my acorns, Mommy!"  I assured her that we would get them the next time we came over.  There was no next time.  My friend sent them home to me last week in a tiny plastic bag.  I wanted her acorns.  I had promised her we would get them.

The girls are here now, and we are so thankful for their health and safe delivery.  We are also thankful for the many, many prayers offered on their behalf.  As wonderful as it is to hear crying and have tiny, soft heads nuzzle into our necks and shoulders again, I have made an unexpected discovery.  My grief is unchanged.  In some ways it is heightened.  I have not written because well, for one thing I am (gladly) sleep deprived and coherent thoughts are harder to come by, but I have also hesitated because I feel this invisible expectation that I must be happy now.  I am so happy about my Abby and my Alena, but I am still so devastated about my Makiah. 

Some days it just seems so unreal that she has vanished from our lives here forever.  I just know she is at preschool with her friends, and that I am going to pick her up at 12.  Other days it is excruciatingly real.  When I am feeding one baby while the other is sleeping, and it is so quiet.  I should be playing barbies or reading princess books or coloring with my spare hand.  She wanted so badly to help feed "her babies."  She asked me once before I was pregnant why it was taking so long for her to get a baby (all her friends had new siblings).  I told her I didn't know, but sometimes God wants us to keep asking him for things and not give up.   Why did it take so long?  Why didn't she get to enjoy them?  Why is it so hard to let go of the life we had and should still have and to embrace this new reality of life without her?  Why can't I wrap my mind around the finality of her death- that she is not coming back? 

So much was stolen from us... from her sisters... from her.   So many things she had to leave undone:  the sisters she cannot kiss, the preschool graduation she can't sing in, her 5th birthday party at the swimming pool she had already planned,  the Tinkerbell ballet she couldn't wait to dance in,  the  acorns she didn't get to go back for...

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