Losing a Child

I have been watching a British tv series through Netflix's watch instantly on your computer feature. I'm up to episode 6. It's called "Monarch of the Glen" and it's about a contemporary Laird's family and how they go about trying to save their estate.

On one of the episodes the mother of the main character was telling another woman about losing her 18 year old son years ago to drowning. The other woman told of having lost an infant years ago. Then the older woman made a comment, "It changes you forever, doesn't it?"

And I sat there and thought Yes, it does. I've lost four children over the years, and the hurt never goes away. I am so not the same woman I'd be today if those four kids hadn't gone to heaven.

Losing a child changes a mother in ways that women who haven't been through it will never understand.

And it makes absolutely no difference that the children were adopted. In some ways it makes it worse, in that you know you were given a gift, and that somehow you should have been able to keep that gift alive. One woman at the funeral of my first son who died made the comment "At least he wasn't one of your own." Such a hurtful comment, and probably the main reason we don't do funerals anymore.

People who haven't adopted a child also don't know that an adopted child IS your child 100%. They simply can't know that, now, can they?

It is wonderful, yes, that I know that those children are safe in heaven, and that someday I'll see them again. But I am changed forever.

I can only guess at the pain a mother feels when her adopted children are removed by CPS. How much worse it must be to not know who is caring for your child, how frightened they must be and you can't do anything to help them. You don't know anything about the people caring for your child. Are they being abused?

My heart goes out to those mothers whose lives have forever been changed by CPS. And I will never say that I understand. I haven't been there.

But what I can say for sure is that losing a child does change a woman forever . The old you goes away with the child, and the new you is a being you would never have expected to see.