It's Just Furniture...

This blog post is a little different than the rest. The point of this post is to be transparent so that someone reading this will feel relief knowing they are not alone. I'm not sure why I've had to walk through most of what I've walked through this past year, but if I can share my story to help other women know they are not alone then it's worth it.

We moved into our house two months before I spent five weeks in the hospital leading up to my twins' premature birth and NICU stay. The way we arranged our bedroom furniture when we moved in was the way it was arranged when I stood up from the bed and my water broke at 27 weeks. It was arranged that way when Isaac came home without Adeline (the darkest time in our journey). It was arranged that way when we got those multiple phone calls in the middle of the night letting us know that Adeline had an event and her discharge date was being delayed by another week. It was arranged that way when my depression set in. All bad memories.

We rearranged our bedroom furniture right before Adeline came home to make more room for another bassinet. For a whole year our babies slept in our room. It was arranged that way when I got bedtime snuggles with both my babies. It was arranged that way when we had their newborn photos taken on their due date. It was arranged that way while I tandem nursed my babies during the night. It was arranged that way when we read bedtime stories and listed to Daddy play the ukulele. It was arranged that way when my babies started saying "Mama" or "Da Da" when they woke up in the morning. All good memories.

When we decided to move the twins in to their own room following their first birthday, I was overwhelmed with sadness. I cried myself to sleep for a week because it felt like my babies were missing from a space that belonged to the four of us. When they woke up in the middle of the night I would bring them back into our room, where it felt less empty again.

So Drew and I decided to rearrange our room and move the changing table out. We decided to make it a space for the two of us as husband and wife again. So we rearranged it to the way we had it to begin with when we first moved in, because we both liked the look of where all of the furniture was. But when I took a step back and looked, I was overwhelmed with grief and sadness. I was brought back to where all the trauma started, the night my water broke. I felt frozen in time as if I were reliving it. I couldn't move, my chest was heavy, my breathing was slow and shallow. Tears filled my eyes.

You may think, why? Your babies are right there with you now. They are alive, happy, and healthy. Why are you dwelling on the bad memories, just look at what you have now.

Easy to say, hard to do. Trauma does that to you. It creates bridges between experiences and memories. Ones that I hope one day will fall down.

The easy thing to do would be to rearrange the bedroom furniture in a new way that it's never been before. A way with no memories tied to it. Hopefully one day we can afford a new bed and that will change the whole look of our room to something fresh. But, until then, the healing thing to do is to create new memories with this layout. This is the arrangement the furniture will be in while my husband and I sip our coffee during our morning devotional before the babies wake up. This is how it will be when we talk about our day and our dreams after the kids go to bed. This is how it will be when the prayers we've been praying for for a long time will be answered.

Everyone has told us this past year is "just a season." I'll be honest, I've grown so tired of hearing that. But, I am looking at this new arrangement as a season. Like every season in weather, the same four come back every year. A little different than the year before. So this "season" may have been rough last time, but this time it will be better in Jesus' name.