Quotes and reflections

This blog is written, largely on one I wrote almost 2 years ago. I've come a long way and yet some things are still the same... but positive, amazing things. It was wonderful for me to go back and read where I was and see how much I've done, especially in the area of TTTS support, awareness and fundraising.
So much of this entry today is just a repeat of that one but based on where I am now and what I've done.

Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense regardless of how it turns out. - Vaclav Havel
I never realized until months after the crisis that I’d been living this Hope for many months on end. I was so full of hope...certain that it would and will make sense someday. I had a lot of 'some days' that it didn’t even come close to making sense and it was so hard to accept but now I think that I am past the worst of that. It isn’t easy and it isn’t the way I’d like for me to act sometimes but I can see that amazing things have happened because of something that has turned out so different than how I hoped.

If you lose hope, somehow you lose the vitality that keeps life moving, you lose that courage to be, that quality that helps you go on in spite of it all. And so today I still have a dream. - Martin Luther King Jr.
In the midst of crisis, tragedy or heavy burdens it is often easy to lose hope. When this happens then life becomes hard to endure and it is so very hard to keep moving forward. All you want to do is go backwards. You become afraid of each new day, of might happen next. It seems like you just can’t go on. But with hope you are able to move forward, you are able to keep going despite not knowing what tomorrow brings because you know that no matter, you will survive, you will grow and the possibilities are endless.

Hope never abandons you; you abandon it. - George Weinberg
Hope, like the love of Christ, is always there. It never abandons you and it never ceases to amaze. It may not always be the ‘amazement’ you wanted but it is always there. Sometimes this seems like an impossible task, to keep hoping for the future when each day brings more and more bad news, tragedy and crisis. I remember thinking this when I was pregnant with the boys and TTTS hit our lives. At first I thought that all was well, we’d get through this ‘little surgery’, go home and be fine. I even wrote this in an email I sent out when I was diagnosed. But when those fated words were said, when my world shattered, I wanted to give up. I remember curling into a ball on that ultrasound table and sobbing, thinking this was it, life was not ever going to be the same and I couldn’t’ possible keep going. And then just when things were looking up abit my water broke. I remember saying to Geoff ‘when will this nightmare be over’. What a way to look at my pregnancy, my sons…a nightmare. But I’d lost hope, I abandoned it. Thankfully I found it again, or it found me. Thankfully it continues to find me and I it each and every day!

We have to go into the despair and go beyond it, by working and doing for somebody else, by using it for something else. - Elie Wiesel
Did she read my mind??? This is exactly where I was at about 2 years ago and where I continue to gather strength from now. I figure God has given me this loss for a reason, He's given me grief for a reason, He’s given me financial stress, marital stress and parenting stress for a reason and He's given me Hope for a reason. I don't know for sure what it is. I know that I was desperate to find a focus for my grief and to come up with some way to make all that we lost and all that we learned and gained have purpose. Something that would bring attention to the need for better monitoring and testing of identical twin pregnancies as well as raising funds for research, treatment, support and care of those going through it. And I did it, twice over. And I give hope to others on this journey regularly. I have found a relationship with Jesus Christ and have begun to rebuild a relationship with my husband. I’ve gotten beyond so much of that despair and I’ve gained so much through this hope.

These are the hardest times, especially when those who are younger than you take their leave, and there are times when I forget and permit myself to think that I am in the midst of death. But this is not so. It is life that surrounds me. Life. Life that is meant to be lived, its riches to be extracted. No, the Lord's promise is not for those who give up, but for those who forge ahead... - Leonora Wood
This is so true. God did not wish us to give up and die when life gets tough. It is at those times that He is there, picking us up, dusting us off and moving us ahead. Life is for the living, we can't change who's gone before us but we change how we live before we go. My son died before his time, he died before I got to hold him, touch him, kiss him.....but not before I got to love him. There is no way that such an innocent being would wish for me to be in Heaven with him instead of here with his twin brother.

....each day of the journey is precious, yours and mine - we must strive to make it a masterpiece. Each day, once gone, is gone forever. - John Wooden
The day Cameron was baptized, my dear friend Theresa did an amazing job of including Cole in the service by giving a sermon on worrying. It is so hard not to worry, it is so hard not to focus on the future and where you are going. But you can't focus on the unknown because if you do you lose sight of the present and you miss out on what is with you right now. Once a day is gone it is gone forever. I felt my pregnancy was like that. I worried so much about how I would deal with being the mom of two newborn babies and of the stresses that brought that I didn't appreciate the miracles inside of me. I noticed all the growth, the movements and the wonderment of their little bodies on the ultrasound machine but I did nothing to remember those moments or live in them. I couldn't take that back once Cole was gone, it was too late to take pictures of my belly then, too late to start writing about how I felt about them and the dreams I had. You'd think I would have learned but when my water broke and I was rushed back to Toronto and then London I didn't live in the moment and enjoy Cameron's movements and life, I stressed and worried. I have no pictures of the places I called home for 8 weeks of my life or of the doctors that saved my son, took care of me, welcomed my boys into the world.
I needed to put those worries with God and let Him look after them...it's His job. And I am proud to say that I have come so very far in this area of my life. I do worry about things, about how I’ll pay the bills and what we are living without and what we should be living without instead of adding to our mounting debt but I know that if I spend all my time worrying about it I will miss what is in front of me. I will miss how much my children have come to appreciate simpler things, how much they’ve learned to work together and do things, like chores, because it is part of being in a family not because of what they’ll, selfishly, get out of it…like money. I would have missed the love that has grown between Geoff and I and the HUGE growth our relationship has taken…it likely would not have even happened. And most of all, I would have missed out on this amazing relationship that I am having with Christ.

And so I try my best to live in the present with my family. I try to only look at today and all the wonderful things they do today....not what they aren't doing yet compared to others and not most importantly, I try not to live in the past, in the world of 'what if'. Those days can't be changed, they are gone forever.
I have hope…do you?