Glaring absence

I notice she’s missing more on days when life is normal: sitting at home, watching t.v., grocery shopping, laundry, bedtime, bath time.  I notice her absence when life is the way it was before her.  The dishes, the showers, the chores should be a little more hurried, worrisome, to listen for her to wake up, or cry, or coo.  I notice she’s missing more when I go out for walks and should be pushing her too in the stroller, when the kids get out of the car and I’m minus an infant car seat.  Her presence is not there and the ease of life is deafening, the what-should-have-been is so loud in thumps in my heart, a missed beat. 

                Home is supposed to be a haven, but instead, it’s a sad reminder.  Not her pictures, or her bear, or her once-upon a nursery, but the times in life that are too easy without her.  I am sad by the empty presence all around me.  I feel her there, but I feel her not there.  Life wasn’t supposed to be so easy.  I saw a picture that was sad but true… “People are most messed up in life by what they thought was supposed to happen but didn’t.”   She was supposed to make my life more complicated; I guess she has but not in the ways that she was supposed to. 

                I don’t know how to not notice the glaring difference in a life made too easy by absence.  I’d give up almost anything to have the complication back.  I still wish I had a reason.  Maybe Derek was right… we are closer than we were before.  We had been sort of cruising along, comfortable, happy, content with what we had.  And now, somehow he is more to me than before, and I loved him fully then.   I hold him tighter, but let him go so he stays.  Does that make sense?  How can losing her make me love him more?  I loved my girls, and now I love them more.  How can that be? I want them to be carefree, happy, beautiful in their hearts.  Watching them is almost painful, their innocence and freedom, blinding.  This cannot be the reason for her absence.  It hurts too much to think of.  To lose a baby before I could even see the light of heaven in her eyes, a baby I loved before I felt her, in exchange for loving her family more? Am a fool for not loving them more sooner? I did not think then that it was possible. I loved them with all I had.  The absence is so glaring, the love I cannot share, the place that was reserved for her, now empty.  I am sorry if that is the reason for her going… I did not know I could love more. It cannot be the reason.