I made it.

Well, Thanksgiving was the first holiday to get through and although I got my period, exchanged a few angry words with my husband and cried all the way to my mom's house, (half hour drive) and started bawling the second my brother opened his mouth to ask me how I was when I arrived to our first gathering...I lived through it. Not only that but I even enjoyed parts of it. Then I cried all the way home too. If I could do it over again, I would not have made the last visit where two newborn girls were. What was I thinking?! I certainly wasn't very good to myself, I went out of guilt. Never again.

Yesterday I went back to work. I'm a manager with responsibilities I really do not care to have anymore. Despite that, I made it through the first few days with God's grace. Within the first 30 minutes my worst fear arose. A customer who comes into our store every few days came in. I had a basket over my arm walking past her and down an isle as she called out, "How are you feeling?" Let me stop a second and say, I have been gone for 3 months, my staff told all the customers who asked about me, AND we have an outside sales force who goes into our customers salons (we are a wholesale co. in the salon industry), they all "broke the news" to their salons for me. Anyway, as I was thinking she knew I say "okay, thanks for asking." She says, Aren't you due, wait when, did you already" as I am turning around the corner and she looks at my stomach continues, " oh, I thought you were due around Christmas!" So, I say " Yeah, I already had her early and she is in heaven now." She was mortified, crying, she apologized, and said " How did I NOT know this!" She grabbed me and hugged me so tight and asked me a few more questions and I found myself consoling her. She slipped through the cracks and I'm sure she won't be the only one I will have to tell. It was so hard not to fall apart in the front of my busy store, but I didn't. I made it through my first two days at work.

I don't wanna be strong anymore. I don't want to be in charge of a store and a staff. I want to do something I LOVE. I am different. So, now what?

I just bought a book called Drops Like Stars by Rob Bell. It rocked my world in a way that I haven't fully realized yet. This book is about creativity and suffering. In one part of the book he gives a few of his sculptor friends a bar of plain white soap and asks them to carve something, one carves a bird, another carves a face another, chain links - these are pictured along with the shavings. He writes, "Stunning isn't it? And yet these sculptures were in those bars the whole time. All these sculptors really did was remove. Sculptors shape and form and rearrange, but at the most basic level they take away. And there is an extraordinary, beautiful art to knowing what to take away."

This stopped me in my tracks. God is my sculptor. He knows what to take away from me to make me into a beautiful creation, something that has been inside of me all along is about to be made evident. What? I don't know yet, but as I sat in that hospital before I had Audrey I told God that I trust him with my life and my baby's. I may not like it, it breaks my heart, sometimes I am so mad I could spit fire but God is my sculptor. I gave him my life to shape and rearrange.