Eight Years
Brené Brown notes in Rising Strong (p. 5), "During the process of rising, we sometimes find ourselves homesick for a place that no longer exists. We want to go back to that moment before we walked into the arena, but there's nowhere to go back to." That moment came for me eight years ago. Sometimes, I long for the innocence of before and ache for a different ending – one where three healthy children fill our home with noise and laughter, not two. Everyone has scars; no one who has lived, lives their life unscathed. Because of Isabella’s short life – and her death – I look at life differently. It was incredibly painful not to be able to drop her off at kindergarten. In contrast, dropping our son off for his first day was strangely easy. Other parents stood at the edge of the playground in tears. We waved to him, stuck around for a few minutes (mostly out of social pressure), then left – no tears, no "How is he already in kindergarten?!" or "I'm not re...
