Sisterhood of Angel Mama’s Magazine | Bereaved Mother’s Day Edition
The Measure of a Mother’s Love
Written by Carolie Bond Photos by All-GreatQuotes.com and Unknown
How can you measure a mother’s love? A question you can’t answer, a mother’s love is infinite and never ends therefore a mother’s grief though it may change over years or will never end. I am a mom of two beautiful children my son will be 9 in July and my daughter would have been 8 on May 9th. She was born sleeping at 21 weeks by far the scariest day of my life. I remember feeling like the world was moving at hyper speed. I was rushed to the hospital in an ambulance while my dad stayed with my baby boy. For several hours everything was a blur of doctors and nurses and my daughter was breached and there wasn’t much anyone could do. I was hospitalized and spent three days fighting the labor to keep my baby girl where she was safe. After three days my angel’s heart stopped beating the fight was over.
I remember doctors telling me it was time for me to push. I remember feeling like I couldn’t breathe feeling like this couldn’t possibly be happening. My daughter was born and I only got to hold her once and in those moments all at once everything stopped the room was quiet and the world felt empty. I couldn’t move, grief hit me like a brick wall and I laid there with my beautiful baby girl and prayed that God would take me with her. I couldn’t imagine going on with life without her. My heart was shattered that day and still is, the pieces were scattered between heaven and earth.
This past year I finally found the courage to see a therapist someone to help me navigate through my grief and learn how to go on living. The first thing my therapist told me was that I had to feel it and I had to let myself feel the pain. She said in order to heal my grief had to be as big as my love. For example if your love could fill a 500,000 gallon water tower you would need to grieve enough to fill it. This seems like a reasonable theory at least it did until I asked myself the question. How do you measure a mother’s love? The only answer I can give is you can’t my love for my children will never end, I will love them with everything I have until my last breath. So my grief also will never end. To some this may seem so overwhelming and make life seem impossible.
How do you go on living knowing your grief will never end? For me this realization actually brought me a very small amount of comfort because it made me realize I don’t have to get better, I don’t have to get over it or move on. It gave me the strength to say my baby’s name and it gave me the courage to tell my story it helped me realize that I am not alone in this terrible heart ache and this pain that too many mother’s have suffered. I still have a long way to go and I’m devastated everyday by my loss. I don’t believe it happened for a reason or that there is some magical lesson I should be learning from this terrible loss. I’m not stronger or wiser for it. I’m broken in ways no one should ever have to be and I would give up my life for hers if I could. This love cannot be measured or contained and we should not have to measure our try to contain our grief. My daughter was here she existed and she matters to me her life no matter how brief changed mine.