Forever 21...

Tomorrow is the first birthday that Samantha won't celebrate. It is also the first concrete marker of her absence since her funeral. I have been throwing away reminders from The Atlantic for a while now because there is no reason to renew the subscription Craig and I have given her in the past. I've recognized that I can ignore the nagging sensation that I'm forgetting something. I don't, in fact, have to talk Samantha or her mom to sort out what she'd like for her 22nd birthday, because she will never turn 22.

Birthdays are naturally a time for reflecting on the past, even without a loss. I remember that I actually missed Samantha's birth all those years ago. When I got the call that Janine was in labor and heading to the hospital, I was on the way to a movie. All I knew about labor what that it went on for hours and hours, so I assumed I had nothing but time. Not true, by the time I was heading there Sam was already born. When I did see her, she was a cute little thing with very strong lungs and over the next few months brought lots of evidence of her personal strength and determination. She was not going to be a pushover.

I was there for her 2nd birthday, the first time she really got the idea of presents. She took the first one handed to her and opened it with joy, immediately trying to open it and play. The look of confusion on her face as Janine took it away and handed her another gift to open instead was classic, as was the enormous grin as she realized that she was getting another toy. She opened it and then was further amazed when another was given to her. She immediately starting tearing through all the gifts, recognizing that this was truly a wonderful day. Just thinking about it makes me smile.

There are lots of other memories, the year she got a tutu, crown and wand and spent ages dancing around Meme's house. Clothes she loved, books we read and discussed and always the smile she had on her face when opening them. When I was pregnant with AJ, his due date was Oct 15th and Samantha was very clear that this was not an acceptable birthday for him. If he had to be born in October (which in itself was something of an affront to her), it needed to be 10 days away from hers. So, he needed to be born by October 8th or not come until the 28th. Luckily, he was born on the 8th so a crisis was avoided. Samantha generally did get her way.

All the happy memories help and hurt, which is pretty normal for a situation like this. There are still periods of time where I just can't accept that she's really gone, also normal. The next few months will be full of times when avoiding that reality will be impossible. Her birthday, obviously, but also coming is Thanksgiving, the last time our entire family was together. We finally took that group picture we've been talking about for years so we have a record of her last family holiday. The first Christmas without her is also coming. While we will still find joy in the holidays and our time together, there will also be a sense of loss and a knowledge that something is missing. The challenge, of course, is to remember Samantha at these times without making that loss the center of the events, particularly for the other children. A challenge we all acknowledge and I think won't have a problem meeting.

We may never get to see Samantha at 22 or 32 or 42 and get answers to questions like whether she would eventually have had kids of her own, but we did get 21 years with her and that is a lot of wonderful memories. Samantha will always be part of our family and those memories will keep her alive over the years to come.

How easily we forget...

I have, over the past few months, been slowly trying to de-clutter our house. For a good portion of the last 8 years, we would often find ourselves with something that we couldn't quite figure out where to put or we didn't have time to handle at that moment. Inevitably, we shoved it in a drawer or a basket or on a shelf to deal with later. This has been my chance to sort it all out, throwing away what we didn't need and finding a home for all we wanted to keep.

A week or so ago, I found a stack of pictures from a trip I took with CJ when he was only 3 months old, visiting a pregnant friend at her mom's in Montana for a week-long baby boot camp. One in particular made me stop cold. It was a shot of me and CJ sitting on her couch. There was nothing particularly special about the shot, I was looking at him and he at me and we were both smiling, but it shocked me because I looked happy and content and thrilled to have this little guy next to me.

It shocked me because I suddenly realized that I never think of myself as being happy when CJ was a baby. I know I must have been, obviously, but to me his first year has become a time of continuous crying and sleep deprivation. My strongest memory from that time? The night when Craig woke up and came into CJ's room at 3 am to find me yelling at him in his crib that he HAD to sleep because I couldn't take it anymore. Craig calmly took me by the shoulders, led me out of the room and put me back in bed and then handled CJ himself. Definitely not my strongest mom moment, but a pretty accurate picture of where I was at the time.

During one of CJ's occupational therapy sessions last year, I was speaking with the director of his program and talked about this time. Another mom overheard and chimed in with her story, almost identical to mine. She actually said that she felt like she was suffering from PTSD by the time she made it through her son's first year. The director said that it was completely typical behavior for infants like CJ and her son, the crying and inability to sleep consistently are an early symptom of their disability. It was amazing how relieved this made me feel, even after all these years, knowing that I wasn't alone in my experience and that it wasn't something I was doing wrong that made him so different from his brothers.

Still, I realized last week that I haven't put it behind me because I haven't managed to rebalance my thoughts of that time. As challenging as he could be, CJ was a sweet and adorable little guy who had lots of wonderful moments and I'm doing him and myself an injustice by not focusing on our happy times together as well as the struggles. I've never sat down and put together an album of his first year as I did with his big brother. I'm thinking this is the time to do that and revisit ALL the memories of that year.