This post has been stewing and building for a couple of months now and I can no longer contain it.  It may be controversial and I might take some flak for it, but I have to do it.  

So here goes...

10 months ago today my second son was born and he died the next day.  The details of which are many and not all important for the purpose of this post.  What is important is that I recently discovered a really cruel and inaccurate blog post that was written 6 weeks after Joseph's death regarding me and how I am "narcissistic, selfish and immature."  This blog is call The SOB (Skeptical OB-GYN) and is run by a women named Amy Tuteur.     

Here is how this unfolded: I had a hunch to google my name one day.  The fourth link down was one entitled: Sure my baby died, but look at the benefits to me. So I clicked on it and read on.  

My emotions started out at shock.

Then moved to anger. Then rage (like I would rip your eyeballs out if I could reach you rage).

Then sadness, deep sadness.  

Sadness for me, Joseph, my family. But even more then that I started to feel sadness for Dr. Amy.  It seems to me that someone would have to have been treated (or treated themselves) incredibly cruelly to respond to someone else the way she did me just 6 weeks after my son had died.    

This post is not about my defense to her accusations however. To be blunt, I think her limited and perhaps stunted view of the situation is fairly obvious on its face.

What I do intend this post to be about is a continuation of last weeks post, on the Symbolic Language.

Now before I go there, I need to give a little bit of back story about what happened.  In a nutshell, Joseph showed me the true meaning of unconditional Love. I feel like he gave his life to deepen mine, to give me back to me and to help me discover my drive and purpose in life. Part of which is now spreading his wonderful message of how loving and supportive the universe is.  

Before I found out I was pregnant, I had a conversation with God (universe, spirit) and in this conversation I stated that I was feeling pulled in two directions: one towards my career pursuits and my passions and the other towards mothering another child. At the time these seemed like conflicting aims since mothering for me is a very all encompassing thing for the first 2-3 years. So I asked for guidance about how to proceed. Two weeks later, I found out I was pregnant (we were not trying).  

I figured that was a pretty clear answer: the path of mothering it is.  

This brought up another conversation with God for me:  Chiron our first son, has Cystic Fibrosis. It has been a long, hard road to walk at times. It will most likely continue to be for the rest of his days. I was sure that I couldn't handle a second child with CF and I didn't want another child to have to deal with what Chiron has to everyday.  I stated that I was ok with this child not coming to fruition if they weren't healthy (thinking early miscarriage, of course).

But the pregnancy continued normally with no signs of any issue, so I assumed that all was as it should be.

Fast forward 9 months, Joseph is born, at home and is not breathing.  He was showing no signs of distress up to that point, but we were not monitoring him for the last few minutes of labor.  Here is what happened as far as we can tell: he pinched off his umbilical cord with his own hand during the final minutes of delivery.  

This in and of itself is HIGHLY symbolic for me and my family.  It was not an "accident" that killed him, he LITERALLY cut off his own air supply.  

The problems multiplied because the paramedics and ER team were having a hard time reviving him.  His lungs were not functioning properly.  At that moment I knew that he too had CF.  We requested the test and sure enough he did.  His lungs were having problems from the moment he was born.  

This brings in more symbolism: little did I know what I was asking for when I stated that I was ok with the baby not making it if he wasn't healthy, but sure enough someone/thing was listening, in a strange, unforeseen and miraculous way.

The miracle is that had Joseph just miscarried early on in the pregnancy, I would have been sad, but never would I have been so profoundly affected. I cannot describe what happened internally for my husband and I very completely here.  I have never in my life been so filled with unexplainable and unconditional Love and Gratitude like we were after Joseph's brief journey into our lives. NEVER.

Now as if that wasn't enough symbolism- and there was so much more- here I am, a few months after Joseph's death reading the blog of a women I have never met before that is essentially calling me a selfish baby-killer. After I had taken a couple of hours to grieve and be angry and feel all that came up for me (and after I had gotten over the fact that I wanted to sue her for defamation of character), I started to notice some interesting symbols in her post.  

The opening picture of Dr. Amy's post is the same picture I used to open this post, I (heart) ME, written in the sand.  

I gasped and started to cry.  This time out of joy.  

On Mother's Day, a few months prior to my discovery of Dr. Amy's post, my family, one of my best friends and her partner went to the Oregon Coast to celebrate and remember Joseph and the crazy year it had been so far.  We wrote Joseph's name in the sand as a remembrance and watched as it was washed away by the ocean.  It was cathartic, healing and connective for us all.  It was something tangible that we could do for him.

I realized that yet again, I was getting another message from the universe, I LOVE ME was what was said in the photo, but it meant so much more than even that.  

To me this was another expression of what Joseph meant to me, LOVE, in the universal sense. It also felt like a little message of encouragement on my path as I walk towards a fuller expression of myself and my Love in the world.

I think that learning to Love oneself is key to a happy, healthy, love-filled life and is not a problem.

I do love me and I hope that you love you as well. Some days that is all we get.  

I would like to formally thank Dr. Amy for doing what she did. She gave me a special message of Love in the unlikeliest of places. Even what looks like hatred can really be Love in disguise.  

She also lit a fire under me.  When I was able to calm down and look at her with the eyes of compassion, I realized that the only thing she was guilty of doing was living in an ENTIRELY different version of reality than me.  And in her version of reality, I must look like a pretty self-absorbed, narcissistic, immature baby-killer.  

I also realized that I like my reality.  Here are a few of the salient views in my version:

1. Death doesn't exist.  At least not in the way that we act like it does.  
2. There is no such thing as an accident. Everything happens because it is right that it does in a more cosmic way than we may understand. There is perfection in everything.
3. We are so undeniably connected to each other, in fact we are all one.
4. Since we are all one, I like to say we are little walking individuations of God, when we hurt someone we are hurting ourselves and everyone else.  
5. Love is all there is.
6. There is no such thing as right and wrong.
7. The universe (God) is speaking to everyone, all the time, in many ways.
8. Last but not least, you create your own reality.

What version of reality are you living in?

I'm going to expand on these truths over the next series of blog posts, so stay tuned.