Sorry for being a slacker. I've had a lot of things on my mind, but haven't been able to crystallize them into a blog post. Even still, this post feels flat and lame. There are others who've said it better and louder. I'm just an echo, but a real echo, a living, feeling echo.

Last weekend (October 25) was our one-year anniversary with Pea. I wasn't really prepared for the onslaught of conflicting emotions. I knew I should expect some--after all, I've read about others' experiences of the same day in their lives. But reading and living are not the same, just as thinking and knowing are not the same. I didn't expect the echo in my life to resound quite so strongly. I think about Pea's former life quite often and I try to empathize with that first family that seems so "foreign." My culture, my values, my worldview, my understandings, my ways of thinking and doing are so different, yet I want to grasp something of "them," something of the first ones to hold her, the first lullabies sung to her, the first heartbeat she heard and loved; something of her mother's heart, her mother's hopes and dreams for our precious girlie's life. Of course, I want to have something to share with Pea, but I want that "something of them" for me too. I can surmise all day long about the various circumstances and surroundings, but that doesn't matter to me so much as WHO they were, WHO they are and I barely have a clue to start building upon.

Loose ends make me feel loose myself, ungrounded, unstable, uncertain, unsure. Some people relish these sorts of mysteries with excitement. I tend to grasp at straws trying to make the loose ends meet and make sense. So, we didn't celebrate our first anniversary. I couldn't make sense of the emotions and the mysteries. Plus, being as young as our family is, any celebration we might have had would have been more about the adults than the kids.

I hope to be able to make more sense of things in the coming year. Maybe we'll celebrate our anniversary next year. It just seems odd and difficult to me to celebrate a moment in life that is not all joyful. How can we celebrate when the moment we're recalling involved hope, joy, love, yes, but also separation, grief, death, loss...? I can't grasp it. I can't see it in my mind's eye. I don't know how to do it. The only thing I know is taking the bits as they come--celebrating the moments of joy and hope and happiness and grieving in the moments of loss and rending, in the moment, when they are present. But, bringing it all together into an "event"? I simply don't know how.