Ava would often come into the bathroom when I was getting ready. She always asked for “lips”. Sometimes I said yes, bending down and giving her a quick wave of lip gloss and sometimes I didn’t.
Too busy, too tired, too expectant that there would be tomorrow.
That’s life, I know, but of course I wish I could do it over.

The wishing is also a gift though, not just a regret. Ivy can have the lips. She can stand on the basin. She can play in my brushes. She can even use the thirty four dollar lip-gloss for nail-polish.   It’s all more than fine by me.    I’ll just stand back and be glad.

I love these moments.  It make me feel that, at least some of the time, my resolution to approach life and parenting differently after losing Ava  is still in place.  Of course I want my lessons to be everyone’s lessons but let it be said..For all the different ways I go about my day since Ava left, I still get tired and impatient and shout. I don’t want to be perceived as a perfect parent because I’m not. I still fall down, I still get grumpy and I still think parenting is one of the toughest gigs on Earth.

But what I do have, just underneath all of that, is an appreciation for their being that completely fills me..it never wanes. I can be so fed up with the fighting and the pesting and the complaining but still be so very grateful they’re here to do just that.

I have a card, it says I love you with a thousand hearts. And that’s what I do, every single day, I love them with one thousand hearts.

S x

Ironically, my last post before Ava left was titled “Happy Days”.

It was Australia Day.  We took the boys and Ava to the beach, to Shearwater Crescent..a tiny little strip of coast off a quiet suburban street not far from home.  It was our favorite haunt.   They were having so much fun, making snow angels in the sand, having running races, throwing water over each other – much to Ava’s annoyance.

We sat watching them, talking about the happy little trio they made.  I also remember how many times we told them not to go too far into the water – we were worried about sharks. And how Ava didn’t dress to swim and ended up soaking wet..She traveled home in a shirt and nothing else and threw a tantrum when I wouldn’t take her half naked into the store on the way.  I even remember putting her dinner on a plate when we got in.  Silly little things.

I took a lot of photos that day but in the blur that followed so soon after, I could not find where I had put most of them.  I’ve had three computers since.    I’ve shuffled photos all around and in the back of my mind, been increasingly  worried that I’d lost those priceless images.

Something about me though.. When I’m worried, I avoid.   I pretend and delude and hold some hazy belief it will all be okay in the end.   That approach has meant it’s taken me two years to get brave enough to really look for the rest of those pictures.   And today I found them.   And I caught my breath and I couldn’t look as properly as I wanted to and then, I sobbed.  Not with relief because I’d told myself they weren’t lost.  It was with the intensity of missing.

It wasn’t just missing Ava though..it was the missing of so much more.   Looking at those photos, I didn’t feel a knowing.  Not like then.   I couldn’t hear her voice or remember what it was like to have her here.  To just be together.  To think for four.  To watch the clock on kindy days,  to expect her to walk into the room any moment, to know what she needs for dinner.   It’s not clear any more.  I can’t believe she’s not here yet I can’t believe she was here.

I feared this very thing.  Two years ago I was so scared of anything fading, knowing I couldn’t stop it.  It’s the price you pay – the pain recedes, ever so slowly,  but so do the memories – much, much too soon.   Until now, I’ve desperately yearned to see her again.  To hold her.   Today, I would gladly step back to the start, amidst the full force of grief, just to feel the missing without the haze of seven hundred days.

Today, I miss the missing.

There are little secrets I know about people I’ve never met, or even spoken to.  Not just any people, the ones that have lost children.  For instance, I know they, like me, remember so many tiny little details about the day their children left.  Silly little things that are of no real significance yet become oh-so significant, for so long.

I could share hundreds of tiny little things relating to Februrary the 3rd, 2007.  For everyone else, the people who didn’t lose children that day, I’m certain there would be very little recollection of the date. Slipping by just like most dates, thankfully,  should.

Today, I’m recollecting sun-screen.  I’ve had to do this many, many days in the past 2 years – apply sun-screen to squirming, complaining children, explaining why it needs to be..the whole time remembering that morning.

Sun shining.  (Always, always, my thoughts start with sun shining.  And,  should the sun not have shined that day,  it would likely have been different.  It would have slipped by, that normal, sunny day)..  Boys wanting to swim.  Applying sunblock with a trigger pack, them laughing while I made a game of squirting them with it,  not realizing the mess it was making on the floor until after they’d run off.  Moments later.   All so different.  This memory plays like a movie reel in my head on so many mornings, making the application of sunscreen harder than it should be in everyday life.

Then today, for reasons that again elude, it came to me.  As Ivy wriggled away from my sticky hands, I realized that those moments, those last moments of simple laughter with my kids two long years ago were such a gift.  So precious.    The ending of our untouched life before the arrival of our altered one.  Happy, innocent, trusting, expectant.  Why the movie reel has a different soundtrack today, I do not know.   It just feels so freeing, to have a different perspective today, to feel grateful for something that previously held nothing but sadness.

It’s reminded me to see the everyday things as anything but..to cherish the ordinary, to grasp the moments that should otherwise slip by and be so very, very glad of them.

Sun shining.

S x

You might remember me sharing Crayton’s belief that the harder days are harder simply because Ava is near.  That, as she flies closer,  everything increases – the missing, the wishing, the emptiness.  The memories are clearer and the yearning is greater.   I’m not sure either way about his theory but I do struggle to explain why some days I float, and some days I don’t.   Today,  for no definable reason, the yearning and the missing cloud the normalcy of a regular Saturday that, in dot point, would have looked something like this:

• Wake early
• Kids breakfast
• Tidy bedrooms
• Take Luca to party
• Collect Luca from party
• McDonalds drive thru
• Dinner
• Bed

But, from the inside, filtered through hazey grief, it looked like this:

I’ve not even opened my eyes but I can feel the clouds and I’m already missing and when I get my robe I see her photo looking down at me, the one of her playing dolls at kindy and it reminds me how she will never know motherhood

and

I disbelieve, still, while I go downstairs and start the breakfast and wonder how the making of three serves of toast can leave me feeling so empty

and

a little while later as I walk down the hall I catch a glimpse of her dresses and for the first time, just for a fleeting moment, I wish they weren’t there and I don’t even know why

and

it stays on my mind while I take Luca to choose Lego for the party and after he’s gone from the car and I’m left alone with my thoughts I still can’t think of anything except the hollow and the sorrow

and

then when I go to pick Luca up I take Ivy in fancy dress and she makes a lovely fairy but I can only think about the lovely princess who isn’t on my other hip

and

who, a little while later, isn’t ordering her own Mcfries and apple juice and all I want to do is tell the cashier that today,

just like yesterday and tomorrow,

I am missing Ava.

So I know it was supposed to be a Christmas inspired exercise right? An ornament for our Xmas tree in honor of Ava?  I seem to recall something like that…but, truth be told, our Xmas tree quickly became our “Ava tree” and it still stands proudly in the lounge room with no signs of going anywhere.

I’ll also admit, I was not remotely prepared for the response we got when asking for help with this project.  I was, and still am, overwhelmed by the hundreds of items that arrived.   My fear is by sharing some of those beautiful objects and not all, there could be someone out there feeling left out or unappreciated.  Please accept my genuine apology if I haven’t included an image of your ornament or gift here – there really were so, so many that it would take me forever to share them all.   I want to do these posts to hopefully show just what this means to us -  I will always be truly grateful for the effort so many people went to – the amazing hand made trinkets, the beautiful shop creations people found, the personalized decorations from buntings to dolls, whales and canvases..the heartfelt words, the music boxes, yummy candy and the toys for Ava’s siblings.  And so much more.

After Xmas, some ornaments moved to a spot in the window, hanging from feather and felt garlands, where they remain today.  It was hard to photograph them well as they’re up quite high but hopefully you get the idea.

Endless thanks, again, from all of us.

S xx