change

I am not a tech savvy mama…not by any stretch of the imagination. So me learning how to put pictures on the blog is quite an accomplishment. In doing so I have found myself lost in pictures of our kids…pre-diagnosis. Its like I don’t recognize them anymore…we are all so different….so forever changed. I remember the way it felt back then…but it still feels like I am looking at a different family. I never thought anything could shatter the 6 of us so quickly. We are changed.

I look back on the week leading up to her starting kindergarden and me crying. The night before I got into bed with her and just held her and cried into her hair. I was scared for her…and for how the rest of us would manage away from her a whole 6 hours a day. I desperately didn’t want to let her go…in all senses of the word. I was so “stressed” about getting all 4 kids ready and out the door. I realized that since I became a mom Jennifer had been with me nearly every moment and that was changing. Oh my sweet baby girl.

And now she is gone from her school. We went back to visit the other day. We met the new girl in her class. The girl that is taking her spot since she will never be filling it again. How is the happening?

We are getting so much support from her school, a place we were at for a little over 8 weeks. I am in awe at the support we are getting from all around us. Hearing the story of our daughter being passed around and people opening so much of and from themselves to help us in our time of critical need. On one hand I love it and appreciate it and I want to tell you all thank you from the bottom of our hearts. Our cup truly runneth over and please hear my thank you…But the other hand wants to just slap it all away. Because it makes it all so real. People caring and giving makes this more real. I know I am saying it over and over again but as I release in here…in my journal…the words that I am screaming from inside is still no…please god no….

Yesterday at the hospital I heard JLK singing a song…”shrink tumor shrink”…I think thats the chat her body is calling out over and over again. So in the bathroom at lucille packard we danced and sang to her song…”shrink tumor shrink”. Its the last thing I whisper in her sleeping ear when I leave her for radiation treatment.

 

I love that she is still so full of innocence while experiencing things 6 year olds were never meant to. How she is able to take such a debilitating word like tumor and make it beautiful is magic.

 

She has changed a word that has made my mouth go dry and my hands go numb into her heart song.

And something we can dance to.