Sometimes I wish we didn’t feel. Or that at least I could press “pause” on my emotions, and save them for another time & another day.

Such was the case with this morning. I woke up with a lump in my throat. I realized that time has gotten away from me, for tomorrow Amelia would have been four weeks old. Four weeks old. She would have just barely started growing out of her newborn clothes. I would have changed hundreds of soft, tiny diapers by now, and hopefully, had become an accomplished milk-cow. I would be sleep-deprived and exhausted, but from being her mother instead of from grief.

Oh, how things are so different from how I had planned.

It doesn’t really get better with time. Some days are still really, really hard. Some days I just sit on the couch alone and weep. I’ve heard the emptiness I feel is permanent, that this gaping hole in my heart will never go away. What filled it for such a short time is now lost. So I’m learning to function in this permanent, altered sense of normalcy.

I try not to think what my life would have been. Because it wouldn’t have ever been the way I wanted it, with Amelia still here in my arms. That wasn’t the plan God had for us. That little baby girl at church today with wispy white-blonde hair is a stark reminder of what could have been, but wasn’t meant to have been. But why?

I try not to think too hard. Because take it from me: all of these, “why me?”s  and “why now?”s will get to you soon enough, and then you’re trapped and suffocating in your own thoughts, unwilling to let things go. It’s an endless circle of doubts and fears and scary, scary things.