To Begin With

Dear Lindsay, Bailey and Olivia,

A few weeks ago one of my best friends was taken to Heaven to be with God, and though you keep assuring me, Lindsay, that going to Heaven is a happy thing, I still hear you often whispering to yourselves "Mommy's sad, again" when you see my wiping tears from my cheeks that I mistakenly thought I could shed unobserved.  Silly me, because I know that with you three, almost nothing goes unobserved, unanalyzed and even more rarely undiscussed ad infinitum. So yes, you know I am sad, and you see me everyday find Natalie's pictures or listen to my Natalie playlist, you've seen Natalie's pictures on my blog, you remember being in Natalie's hobbit hole last summer, you know the ways I express myself to those I hold most dear.

Before Nattie died she wrote a letter to each of her children, a little piece of herself in case things went terribly wrong.  We live in a world, I am afraid, where things are far more wont to go terribly wrong, in our eyes, at least, than right. I hope you are able to hang onto the knowledge that all things work to the good of those who love Him.   It is a promise to which I have clung desperately these last few weeks, sometimes with less strength of heart than a person with my life experiences should have.  Speaking of life experiences brings me at last to my point of this post and subsequent weekly posts to follow.  I don't know what will happen to me, to you, to any of us.  I know that God has plans for us, but sometimes those plans do not at all resemble what my plans are.  Sometimes we are caught unaware and there simply isn't time left, to say all the things we wanted to say.

I don't want that to happen to me, to us.

I pray that decades down the road finds you reading this and nodding rememberance because we were blessed with a lifetime of moments to share, but I simply cannot promise that will happen, and so I am creating a gift, a legacy if you will, of my words because it is one of the few things I seem to do well without exception (your mother, being hopelessly flawed).  I love words, and I love you beyond words and hopefully somewhere in the middle I can mesh those two things into picture of how important, how amazing, how breath-taking the three of you have made my life.  How even when I tell you to "get in your beds for your own safety" I am singing inside with joy of being allowed to share your lives so pregnant with possibility.

You are my joy, and I want to be sure, no matter what happens, that you  are never left wondering this.  And so I begin Letters to my Children.