Every day I face the world with a painted on smile.  People ask me how everything is going.  Inside I wanna tell them that the pain is slowly eating away at me each and every time I see a baby close to the same age as he is.  My arms ache to hold a baby and my heart breaks a little more when I hear a baby cry.  But I tell them I’m fine and walk away as if the conversation never happened.

The last few nights I’ve had dreams that have woken me from a dead sleep, cheeks soaked with tears and my heart racing.  I keep hearing the sounds of a baby crying and I wake up in a frantic trying to find him.  But then reality hits and I know there is no baby for me to console, snuggle with, or even just watch sleep so peacefully.  I go into my kids’ room, fix their blankets and cover them up again and kiss them on the cheeks.  Then I go and find the puppy I clung tightly to the day I was discharged from the hospital and curl back into bed and cry myself back to sleep.

Monday he’ll be 4 months.  I figured by now it’d be a little bit easier, but its not.  There’s still a void, but I have to keep moving.  I have two other kids that depend on me and who require me to be the best mom ever.  But its hard.  As I’ve said in a previous entry, people tell me I should be “over it” but its not that easy.  Its not like I can just shove everything into the back of my mind and act like nothing happened.  In my mind I know its the best choice, but my heart is still holding onto the “did I make a mistake?” part.  Obviously I didn’t, but we all know how hard it is to tell your heart to let go.

Seeing the pictures of him and his beautiful smile makes me know that it WAS the best choice.  And in the pictures of them as a family shows me that there’s so much love between them that I would of been a fool to NOT of chosen them.  To be honest with you, I’m not even sure how I came to choose them.  I read their “Dear Birthparent(s)” letter and something clicked inside and told me “they’re the ones!”.  But the reason is beyond me.  But the more I interacted with them through email, phone calls, and in person visits made me even more confident in my choice.  And of course the day he was born, seeing the way they interacted with him made me more at ease with everything.

I’ll always wish he was here with us, that’ll never change.  But he’s so much better off with his new family.  And one day, I will be able to look back on all of this and say “because of this experience, I’m stronger, more confident mother and person.”  When that day comes is beyond me, but that day is soon.