(Corss posted to my other blog.)

I am trying to wrap my head around 5 years.

A friend of mine with a little boy who was born a few weeks after Curtis posted recently that her little guy has his first loose tooth. Seriously? Curtis would be old enough to lose a tooth?

I was packing up Claudia's room this week and at the back of her closet, on the wall, I have 3 wall decals I placed there. They are from Curtis' room. A turtle, a snail, and a ladybug. When I took down his room and turned it into her room, I took a few of those decals and placed them at the back of her closet. I would catch of glimpse of them now and again. Claudia never noticed them until her closet was completely empty and she started laughing at the silly turtle with a hat and the bugs. She wanted to take them down and pack them in a box and take them to the new house. For her new closet. I think that is a good idea.

Each year I say I am going to handle the 2 months leading up to his birthday better, but I don't. It is a subconscious thing, I think. Because when it is here, I realize just how badly I have self destructed without even realizing it until it is past. So, we are just going to take a deep breath and hold on.

5 years.

He would go to kindergarten this fall. He would be playing soccer or hockey. He would be riding a bike. He would have a loose tooth. A dimple like Craig. He would be into the new Cars movie and want a party with his friends.

Or would he?

I don't know.

I have been absent from my blog(s) lately.

But, it is that time of the year again. On top of Curtis' 5th birthday, we are moving.

We live in a small townhouse right now. Craig works over 35 miles away and the commute is killing him, about an hour each way. In the winter it is much more brutal. In the spring when he works 80+ hour weeks, it will be much easier to be close to home.

But, this house. This tiny 2 bedroom townhouse. The walls have started to close in on us. We have two little ones. Two bedrooms. A dog. Toys. It is a great place, but it is too small for us.

We bought this townhouse in 2004. When the economy was okay, when buying was the smart thing because you could turn around in 2 years and sell and buy something bigger. So we bought a place we could reasonably afford and expected to live here for 2 years.

Two years has turned into seven. We tried to sell once, when I was pregnant with Curtis. We couldn't, so we stayed put.

Now, we are moving. Seven years later. We are renting a single family home. Not all that much bigger then what we have now, but it has 3 bedrooms. A basement for storage. A deck. A yard. A yard for the kids. 10 minutes from Craig's work, close to our families. (No more traveling an hour to see Craig's family!).

But....this is the house where Curtis lived. It is where he was created, it is where his heartbeat started...it is where he died. It is very weird to think about. So many of my memories about being pregnant with him take place in this house. Like putting the crib together in the living room and it not fitting through the doorway of his room. Creating his bedroom.

Walking through the door without him on June 1st of 2006.

This house is also the house where Claudia and Cole took their first steps. It is where we brought them home after not bringing their big brother home.

A house isn't where memories live, they live in the hearts of those who hold them. This house has had so much sadness, but so much happiness as well.

There are a lot of mixed emotions flowing around right now.

It is May.Curtis' 5th birthday is in a few weeks.

It is Mother's Day.

We are soon moving out of the house were Curtis lived and where he died.

I read this online recently and it has made it through the loss pages out there, but I thought I would share in case.

Some Mothers Don’t Get A Perfect Ending By Erma Bombeck

IF you are looking for an answer this Mother's Day on why God reclaimed your child, I don't know.I only know that thousands of mothers out there today desperately need an answer as to why they were permitted
to go through the elation of carrying a child and then to lose it to miscarriage, accident, violence, disease, or drugs.


Motherhood isn't just a series of contractions, it is a state of mind
From the moment we know life is inside us,we feel a responsibility to protect and defend that human bein
It's a promise we can't keep. We beat ourselves to death over that pledge.

"If I hadn't worked through the eighth month"

"If I had just taken him to the doctor when he had a fever"

"If I hadn't let him use the car that night"

"If I hadn't been so naive, I'd noticed he was on drugs".


The longer I live, the more convinced I become that surviving changes us.
After the bitterness, the anger, the guilt and despair are tempered by time, we look at life differently.

When I was writing my book "I Want to Grow Hair,I Want to Grow Up. I Want to Go to Boise," I talked with mothers who has lost lost a child to cancer. every single one of said that death gave their lives new meaning and purpose. And who do you think prepared them for the rough, lonely road they had to travel?

Their dying child.

They pointed their mothers to the future and told them to keep going. The children had already accepted what their mothers were fighting to reject. The children in the bomb out nursery in Oklahoma City have now touched more lives then they will ever know. Workers who had probably given their kids a mechanical pat on the head without thinking that morning were making calls home during the day to their children to say,"I love you."

This may seem like a strange Mothers day column on a day when joy and life abound for millions of mothers through out the country.

But it's also a day of appreciation and respect. I can think of no other mothers who deserve it more then those who had to give a child back.

In the face of adversity we are not permitted to ask "Why me?" You can ask, but you won't get an answer.

Maybe you are the instrument who is left behind to perpetuate the life that was lost and appreciate the time you had with them to do it

The late Gilda Radner summed it up pretty well. "I wanted a perfect ending. Now I've learned the hard way that some poems don't rhyme and some stories don't have a clear beginning, middle, and end. Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it, without knowing what is going to happen next. Delicious ambiguity