Favor

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Almost a week ago, my friend, Deena, sent a bunch of her "mom" friends an email asking us to do her a favor.  Deena had the brilliant idea to get all of her "mom" friends to write about different aspects of being a mom.  She is featuring each of the moms' responses on her blog, together with a picture.  She is calling these the Mommy Diaries and will be posting them from now until Mother's Day in honor of all of the moms she loves.  Feel free to check out the first submitter's responses on Deena's blog.   I knew as soon as she sent the email that I wanted to respond, but the questions are hard and I wasn't sure how or what to respond to some of them.  Today is the day I am going to gather the courage to really think about what it is to be Jordan the Mom.  Here are the questions Deena posed:

  1. Highlight of motherhood.
  2. Hardest part of being a mom.
  3. Your best piece of advice (on mothering. Or anything, I guess)
  4. Best product for kids that you have (could be a toy, clothing, just something you'd buy over again or recommend....)
  5. Guaranteed meal that you make that your kid will eat.
  6. Anything else you'd like to say about being a mom.
The second part of the favor Deena asked us to do was to send a recent picture of ourselves with our kid(s).  Deena took one of Calder and I the day before she sent the email out, so I don't have to look for one or take one, but nevertheless, I have thought a lot about the picture she wants.  I don't have a picture with me and both of my boys.  I don't have a picture of Hugh, Calder, Tripp and I.  It makes me sad.  
The thing is that I don't have any regrets about how we spent our 13 hours with Tripp.  The doctors couldn't say how long Tripp would live once they stopped giving him all of the medication he was on.  They said it could be minutes or hours.  We started saying our final good-bye to Tripp around 5:30 pm , but it wasn't until sometimes after Calder's 7:30 pm bedtime that Hugh and I talked about how nice it would be if Calder were with us.  Three things stopped us from calling someone at the house to bring him.  The first was that Calder would be a menace.  He would be grumpy and wouldn't just fall asleep in our arms once he was tired.  In that moment, we didn't want to miss out on precious time with Tripp dealing with a grumpy toddler.  Second, he would already be in bed and we weren't sure if seeing Tripp would just confuse Calder more.  It was already going to be hard to try and explain to him that there wasn't a baby in my belly, let alone trying to explain where his brother has gone.  Lastly, we had an idea of what the last few moments with Tripp were going to be like and we didn't want Calder to see us at our saddest moment.  We thought it might scare him.  So, I don't regret not having Calder with us as we said good-bye to Tripp.  If we would have known exactly how it would play out, we probably would have had him come down, even for a little bit, but we didn't know and so what we did was right and I don't regret one part of it.  It just makes me sad that we didn't have a few moments for the 4 of us to be a family--together.  Hugh and I have photos of the 3 of us together and pictures of each of us with Tripp.  We just don't have any that include Calder. 
I will let you know when I am featured on Deena's blog so that you can check out my responses.

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