A year of construction.....

A new year is fast approaching, only 12 days remain of 2009, and I am sure I'm not the only one with resolutions for a new year on their minds. We all seem to face the dawning of a new year with hope and excitement and wonder, what will this new year bring? Hopefully new starts, new opportunities, and new adventures.

2009 was admittedly, a rocky year for me and my family. 2008 was pretty hard on us as well. We've had what feels like years of destruction and are looking to 2010 to bring some rebuilding. We've underwent some serious life transformations in the past two years, and big changes seldom happen without some hurt, growing pains I suppose.

My husband and I lost a child. We had identical twin boys on November 17th 2007, six weeks premature but otherwise beautiful, healthy babies following a very good pregnancy. When the boys were just a week old, baby A, Everett, began to show signs of being unwell. His condition deteriorated rapidly and before we knew it he was whisked off to Sick Kids in Toronto to begin treatment for a collection of very serious heart defects. He underwent every procedure possible to save his life. Two open heart surgeries, a cardiac catheterization, peritoneal dialysis, and ECMO, all noble, but unsuccessful efforts to mend the broken heart he was born with. When he was 20 days old, Everett died, and Elvis and I left Sick Kids with empty arms and shattered hearts, and returned to Orillia to claim our baby B, Landon, who was precious and perfect and healthy, and salve to our wounds. Our daughter Avery, who was just two at the time, also served as a great source of comfort and love, but changes had happened, and were still happening, that would change the course of our lives.

When Everett died we were introduced to grief and loss and the agony the accompanies the death of a child. We lost some innocence, and some ignorance, and the confidence of feeling untouchable, like "these things can't happen to us", they can, and they did. And we started to feel like a statistic, a worse case scenario statistic.

We picked up and moved on and continued to live. Time lessened the intensity of our hurt but our hearts were never the same. We loved (and of course still do love) all our children and life began to feel like it was on a livable path again. Through the persistence of some good people, and by the giving of a simple book, Elvis and I were able to mend fences with God who we were angry with from the loss of Everett, and we found Christ all over again, in a new and more authentic relationship. We found a church, became involved, and found ourselves in a fantastic small group of Christ loving friends to learn and laugh with. And though on the surface things were looking good for us, parts of our foundation were still crumbling.

"We" were crumbling. Elvis and I were crumbling at our base, our marriage, and we didn't see it happen in time to stop our whole world from tumbling over once more.

In August 2009, our marriage flat-lined, the heart of us stopped beating, and we did something I never imagined could ever happen to us, we separated. This happened to take place at the same time I discovered I was pregnant again, for the third time, and a week later miscarried. Devastation. For the first time in over 7 years, the world around us viewed us separately, two individual units, not a couple. My life made absolutely no sense and I found myself not knowing how to live my life without my husband and best friend. Couples who had underwent separation before had explained to me either how they reconciled, or how they divorced, in attempts to be helpful, and my heart ached at the prospect of further separating from Elvis. So I dug my heals in and stalled the process. And while I bought myself some time, I prayed, and prayed, and read, and talk and prayed. And God granted me the courage to continue to hope and love and wait, and eventually God granted "Us" a second chance. We found a fantastic Christian counselor whom we're still talking with and Elvis moved back into our home and we're reading and talking and praying and working on picking up the pieces of our life together. Its hard, and sometimes it hurts, but its working and once more we're starting to feel like we're on a livable path again.

The death of a baby
A miscarriage
A near ending of our marriage

Lots of breaking down. Lots of falling a part. Lots of deconstruction. Lots of hurt.

But, lots of learning, and personal growth, spiritual growth, and a deeper understanding of what it means to love someone, and what God wants from marriage.

It looks like rubble, but its really a building site, for a new life and a new marriage. The perfect place to start anew, in the wreckage of our past failures and hurts and losses.

And on the dawn of 2010, we're drawing up blue prints for what our new life and new love will look like, and we're gearing up for our first big project together with this new outlook and Christ as our foreman. This will be a year of building up, a year of starting new and doing things right, a year of construction, building our new love and new life on the rock that is Jesus, so when life gets hard, which it inevitably will, our foundation won't be swept from under us again.

Katie