God really does answer prayers. I really wanted to make it to MOPS again but just haven't felt ready. I missed PWOC Tuesday morning and with Rob being gone this week, needed some more adult interaction. I had a hard time getting out of bed and it would have been so easy to stay in bed and miss MOPS but instead I prayed. I asked God to help me. I knew MOPS would be hard. There are several newborns right now. Two at my table alone - a boy and a girl, but only one was there today..the girl. (Deep breath) It wasn't too bad. There were times I started to focus on her and could feel it coming but God had taken care of me up until that point so I knew I just had to let it go. Somehow...it worked.
Today's topic was Hot Topics for Kids - the two that stood out most to me were deployment and death. If you've ready my blog at all, I'm sure you understand why. I got teary eyed thinking about the deployment and how to handle it, handle Natalie, handle life for 12 months. We'll handle it but I definitely think there are some things we need to do before hand to better prepare. The death discussion didn't sit right with me though. First of all, one of the "experts" on the panel, who is a professional - gave an answer to a question that didn't really answer the question and bothered me more because of that. The question was something about when to introduce death to a child and begin having those discussions and something was said about young children not understanding the permanance of death. The "expert" said 6 or 7 years old! I was already thinking, as soon as the question was asked - you talk to them at any time but it's going to be influenced by when they experience death around them - pet, grandparent, parent, relative, sibling, friend. After she spoke some more, she was saying children don't usually grasp the permanant part of death until age 6 or 7. Others in the group spoke about how once a child experienced death through a pet or older family member, how it leads to lots of other questions about dying - like when are you (mom & dad) going to die? Let me tell you something - when you talk to your children about death, please be real with them, and yourself. You may want to live a long life and still die before your children, you may think that's it works but guess what? That's not how it always happens. You DO NOT KNOW when you're going to die, when your child is going to die, how you'll die, etc. There is one thing you do know, if you are a Christian - God knows. (God knows everything, huh? Funny how that works.) From Psalm 139:16...Your eyes saw my unformed body; all the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be.
You know something else, too. How well you know it or how you think about it may depend on your life experiences though. But ultimately, I hope you know that death is not the end. There is so much more waiting for us after we are gone from this Earth and these bodies. I know, so much more than I did 4 months ago, that I am going to heaven when I die and that it will be GLORIOUS! I'm not afraid of dying. Dying is not scary. Actually, in a way, dying is what I'm living for. I'm trying to live my life on this Earth, the best I can (with God's help and strength to get through each day), doing His will, not mine so that my family can ALL be together one day because right now we're missing a precious little girl with a head full of hair. I didn't want to be but in a way, I felt like the expert on death in the room - it's just so fresh and so in my face, so painful. And that's crazy coming from someone who had six grandparents growing up (counting my dad's step-parents but I never knew the difference) and only one has left this Earth (a little more than a year before Ryan died), grew up with two great grandmothers, has "5 generation" pictures (yes, plural - both with me being the 5th generation ...me, my mom, grandmother, great-grandmother, and great-great-grandmother and pictures with Natalie (and Ryan since I was pregnant with her in the last one) being the 5th generation.
I never really had pets growing up so not much death there. (I've actually worried about how I'll handle it when my dogs die because I felt like I had experienced so little death in my life and they were my first babies.) I have had some people around my age (at different points in my life) die but mostly people I wasn't very close to/didn't know well. Except one - a friend I grew up with and had a love/hate relationship with but was close to in middle school but probably hadn't really talked to since sophomore year of high school, 6 years before he died...and that was hard, and still is almost 5 years later. I've always thought it was so hard on me because it was the first person I had been really close to that died, and I still do. But today...I felt like the expert in the room on death. (BTW, I'm not an expert, it's just a big part of my life right now.)
I'm not sure where I had intended to go with all that, other than asking you to be real with your children about death. There are few certainties. Don't lie to them or tell them things you don't know to be true, like that you're not going to die for a long time. Even if they are young, I think children understand more than we give them credit for. I also think to teach children, you have to go a little above their level. You talk to them on their level but you have to go a little beyond also or they'd never learn. (Your math teachers didn't continue to teach you 1+1 since that's what you understood, they went beyond to 1-1, 1*1, 1/1, 1x+1, etc.) Also tell them about heaven and how glorious it is. Death does not have to be scary.
We love you, Ryan Elizabeth.
