letting go...{day 18}

this space sits quiet over the weekend...

a bit like me, i guess.


i've breathed through the days as i've looked at the clock, timing waves of contractions that come every 5-7 minutes for hours at a time and i whisper for her to hold on, quiet myself, will my body to keep her in for the next forty days.


and they space out as i breathe slow...

as i slow.


until this morning when everything seemed to shatter under the weight of my voice and my hurt and my anger.  when i found it hard to even keep up with my breathing, let alone my thoughts and as i chose to stay home while everyone else went to church, i found myself trying to breathe through each painful wave.


all those years ago, before tony and the wedding rings and the babies, she let me box up those tea cups from scotland that her man had purchased for her on their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary.

and it's here in this home that i finally unwrapped the last of them and placed them in that hutch in our kitchen.

and in moments uncertain and unsteady, you reach for what brings comfort and what i reached for in that moment was a left-over, fragile piece of my gramma.


and there is a stash of tea that i've made last for almost two years, given in one of the hardest times of my life and when i fail and life seems a bit shaky, i reach for this comfort and curl up around the wounds that settle heart-deep.

and she kicks.

steady and hard.


i place what i have left of my gramma against my hard and swelling belly and this baby? she presses back with a foot or an elbow or a knee...

i can't see either one of their precious faces, but Jesus formed both of them and me and whether here or there, we all sit in His presence.


and she pushes back...

we don't have to keep clutching, holding on to the anger, the hurt, the pain.

they are thorny bedfellows and the pain they drag with them only cause one to spill out a poisonous venom.


we can push back.


and maybe this is where i've wrestled the most - letting go of what has hurt deeply.

this small one, this baby-girl who will make her presence known at some point in a fast-approaching future, she needs to say wrapped up in my skin for a wee bit longer, but what i have clutched tightly to - the wounds that i have allowed to remain open - i need to let these go in to the Hands of The One Who Heals.

and the process - it's pain-full.

but letting go allows for new life to come,

allows for His Peace to course through and soften hard veins.

and so i sit, quiet - and breathe out prayers to the Only One Who can deliver me safely into the coming day where His mercies are new every. single. morning.