I wish I was a Baller

There is a catchy song in which the rapper laments how short he is saying he wishes he was a baller. wishes he was taller. wishes he had a girl who looked good so he could call her. i'm not really sure what the rest of the song says (don't google it grandma!). Doesn't really matter. Just trying to set the tone of this blog so you get interested enough to read.

i've begun to accept Maddie's death as a reality. I spend fewer and fewer moments of my life praying and begging for God to reverse time or completely replicate her DNA and put her back in my womb. I haven't heard her phantom cries or expected a call from UCSF admitting it was an elaborate hoax for a while now. I miss her daily and am still mourning all of the details of the life she has not been living. But somehow, I'm beginning to make peace with her death. Emerging (maybe only for a minute) from the great darkness that has enveloped me for months.

But I wish I was a Baller. Ok, not really. But i do wish I was an artist. It makes me sad that there will be no more pictures of Maddie. And that there are details of her face that my untrained eye doesn't recognize as uniquely hers. I wish I had the talent to learn the exact bow of her lips and arch of her bow so that I could draw or paint or sculpt it. So there would be more of Maddie. More angels. More shading. More expressions. More everything. Explore her face without the tubes. Draw her with and without dimples (don't know if she had them). Put to paper what my mind's eye sees when I imagine her with hair and smiles. Pigtails. Scraped knees. Sheet wrinkles on her cheek just after she wakes up. Things that never were, but could be if i had the time and the talent.

I also wish I could write. Not my blog. I love writing my blog and based on some of your feedback, you love reading what I have to say (probably because you are crazy). But i wish I could do with Madelyn's life what Gregory Maguire did with Oz. What Christopher Moore did with Jesus's life. I wish i could take a story so familiar, but view it from a new angel. Create a world in which Madelyn still lives and grows. Fight all of the fights we would have had. Meet the man she would have married and imagine the grandchildren she would have given me. Add depth to her "character" and meaning to the life she would have lived. I wish i could write fiction in a way that would allow me to bring her to life for a few moments at a time, even if it is all fantasy.

I wish i had some kind of musical talent so i could create something incredibly simplistic yet beautiful in her memory. Something that would move the masses to cry and long and love all at the same time. Something that would inspire you to reach out and hold the hand of who ever is near.

But there are things we cannot change. I am an extrovert with just enough literary talent to share my heart on this blog without fear or apology. I am incredibly pragmatic and unable to imagine too much of a fantasy world. I cannot form a complete image of a world in which Madelyn still lives and breaths and grows, despite me wanting that more then anything in the world. I am a wife struggling to remember how to love her husband the way he deserves. I am a mother trying to balance my grief and duties. Trying to parent in a way that will not pressure my child to feel as if he has to make up for what we lost with Maddie.

I have also accepted that my relationship with God is a life long journey and have found some peace by calling a temporary truce with him. I have not denounced my faith, nor has it been renewed. But i recognize that much of my understanding of God and his character were like a house made of sticks, and then came a storm. So now I am determined to very carefully rebuild my understanding of God brick by painful brick. But i will not rush it or cut corners. And if that means I have to walk blindly for a while, I am ok with that. (and i'm really mixing metaphors here, hopefully i make a little bit of sense to someone out there).

It hurts. and i'm still sad. tears are so commonplace now that i rarely bother to wipe them away. but we (my family) are starting to emerge.