I’m just gonna say it:  Motherhood changes your perspective on a lot of things. Well, everything.  Boy, I said a mouthful there, and cliché, yes.  But seriously.   Quite suddenly you can’t watch the evening news anymore because you can’t bear anything negative in your life.  You begin to appreciate those trite little cutesy inspirational memes that everyone else has been posting on Facebook.  And then you realize that you’re in it for the long haul when your two worlds collide (your former ‘real’ life and your newly acquired ‘parent’ life) and you use parenting terms to describe things that might be happening to you in your regular life too.

Let’s take for example the term “let down”.  When it comes to child-rearing, and breastfeeding in particular, “let down” is what happens when your child is nursing and your milk literally releases itself down through your ducts and out of your body, en route to nourish your infant.  “Let down” is a varied process… some women can feel it as a burn or sharp pain, others feel nothing at all.  Some women’s bodies “let down” milk too fast, causing the child to gag and pull itself off the breast so as not to choke.  And then, some women’s bodies “let down” too slow.. causing an impatient tot to fuss and rebel and scream in protest that they’re not being fed fast enough.  For all of its variations, “let down” is what it is – different for all women, and quite often an obstacle they have to learn to navigate around for the health and nourishment of their child.

(Here’s where I compare something motherly that I’m learning about with something profound happening in my ‘real life’.)

I am experiencing yet another type of “let down” that I didn’t learn about in a baby book or on the interwebs, and frankly I could have gone an entire lifetime without knowing anything about this ‘let down’.  And that is the let down of losing someone dear to me at the same time I’m gaining someone so precious into my life.

In an ill-timed twist of fate – a diagnosis so raw and heinous that it makes you question the very order of things in the universe – as our little Dante Angelo becomes stronger and more vibrant each day, his paternal grandmother Angela (for whom he is named)  is losing her life to a battle with Butterfly Glioblastoma… a brain tumor so aggressive and so inexplicable that we are left reeling and questioning on a daily basis as to “why” – why this?  why now?  why her of all people?  WHY???

Against the suggestion of my pediatrician regarding travelling with a newborn, yet knowing that we didn’t have much time, we made the trek to Connecticut this past weekend for a few precious moments (and many pictures) with Dante and his grandma.  Fleeting moments that will need to last him a lifetime.

I can’t say that I didn’t replay over and over again a vision that I had of him at 5 years old, bounding up the stairs before we could even get our luggage into the house, yelling “Grandma! Grandma!” to find her waiting for him in the kitchen, ready with a bear hug and a table full of freshly-made Italian cookies.  I stared at that staircase more times than you can imagine, replaying that scene in my mind, and saying to myself “it’s not fair, it’s not fair.”

And again my two worlds collide as I experience this ache as a girl losing her future mother-in-law to a horrible disease… simultaneously amplified by the sharp pain I feel as a mother whose son will not get to know the majesty of the woman who is his paternal grandmother – a woman so kind and remarkable that the very angels for which SHE is named had better appreciate what they are taking out of this world.

Although I know we’ll always be okay, I ask myself… What is the sense in all of this?   What is the grand plan?  The meaning?  Maybe we will never know, but can hope that clarity will come in time.  Until then, when we can begin to understand, it is… the biggest let down of them all.

forever in our hearts