I look back to the months from July-November, when Eli was growing inside me. He was growing. I was growing; my body and spirit. My heart was growing and breaking all at the same time. I didn't know that was possible. My love for him expanded and grew so quickly. I've never experienced anything like that.
I knew the bigger my heart grew, the more there would be to break. I didn't care. It was a beautiful but agonizing experience all at the same time; knowing that every new connection that was formed and every new feeling of protection and outpouring I felt would eventually lead to more pain and more bleeding. I made a bigger place to be destroyed and more surface area to be skinned and be left bloody and raw.
I act like I made that place....I created the love, but I didn't. I allowed God to give me that. I could have shut it down. That wouldn't have been the natural path for me, but I could have done it. I sensed that I could have shut it down, but it would have required effort. Letting the love in was surprisingly easy and I feel comforted by that fact. My actions were guided by love. They were guided by the fact that God gives and takes life and it was never in my power to assume that, even though the doctors told me that it was absolutely my "right" and within my "power" to do it. I knew better. I knew that was the height of presumption. To take the life that God had allowed to grow in me. To act like all of the life that he had given me previously, in my other children, but also in my soul, were of my own making. They weren't and I knew it. I knew that not allowing the growth of Eli was never REALLY my decision, but the growth of my love for him felt more like a decision; although it was almost as natural as a developing fetus in the womb.
Feeling your heart break, while it is growing so rapidly, is excruciating, but you sense the sacredness of it too. I feel mostly the heartbreak now, where I felt both almost equally before. Now one is overtaking the other, but I can't imagine that God will always allow that to be so.
My body and my spirit seemed to wither in almost complete synchrony just as the growth seemed to occur in unison. The bigger Eli got, the more full my love and my willingness to offer Eli felt. After he died, my body shrunk almost instantly and so did my spirit. I was empty; literally. Everything was empty....everything. I could feel my physical body with all contents of the womb dead; my excessive water was gone; my muscles had atrophied. I felt like I would shrivel up. I have never felt so small. I have never felt like my soul and my body were in such agreement. I can feel the muscle, literally coming back almost in complete unison with my spiritual muscles. They are still very weak and smaller than they should be, but they are growing.
