not forgotten.....

I was 39 when our daughter died.

In today's society I was "irresponsible" for being pregnant "again" when I already had 5 children. With 2 of them being special needs, and being "old & tired" in the "high risk" pregnancy category, I should never had "wanted" or "tried" to have another child.

I didn't care.

The more the merrier was my motto.

And the joy, oh the joy, when we found out it was another girl after our string of boys!!!

I had never looked forward to having a child as much as I had with that one!! The one that society said I was "blah, blah, blah" to have. Oh, how I still want her!!!!

Today is the 10 year anniversary of the day that a link in our family was broken. It is still in tact in God's time, but here on earth we are missing a daughter, sister, our baby girl.

It isn't acceptable to say in polite society that I'm the mother of 10 with 6 still living. I know. I've tried. People absolutely freak out when you say it. But the missing children are not forgotten. Even though I'm the only one in the family that "knew" them, even my knowledge of them is fleeting. We don't know what they would have liked, or looked like, or grown to be. But they are members of our family, and are not forgotten.

So I look at little girls in the 4th grade and wonder who she would have been friends with, what her interests would have been, how the older sons and daughter would have been with a little sister. What would it be like to have a 10 year old girl living in my home?

It wasn't meant to be.

And even though I don't have all those answers, or knowledge, or the fulfillment of those hopes and dreams for that dear little daughter, she is still very much a presence in my family.

Surely absent, but not forgotten, and still loved.