"A pleasure is not fully grown until it is remembered"

All mother's know that there is a life timeline that is always before or after she got pregnant and with which child. A few Sunday mornings ago we were eating breakfast and Jonathon and I were talking. I made a comment that the event was before I got pregnant with Lydia. We continued on talking a couple of sentences later we heard Micah's little voice say, "I wanna see Wydia." We pulled up a picture on Jonathon's cell phone and handed it to him. We expected that he would lose interest and start scrolling through the pictures like he loves to do. His hands looked so little holding the iPhone, but his words were so big. "Awwww, there she is, there's Wydia. She's a princess. Shhhh, she's sleeping (her eyes were closed in the picture). Be vewy quiet so we don't wake her." He stood the phone up next to him and talked for a few minutes about his sister. We then talked about how Lydia lives with Jesus. I read a book after Lydia died about how the children who had died were like unseen witnesses of the Gospel in their home. I think that "Wydia" may play that role on our home. But it is our job to give her memory the presence to do so. I am Lydia's mother and I mothered her from the moment of conception to her very last breath. I used to feel like I was robbed of the chance to raise her and take her with me through our lives together. I realized that morning that I still get that chance to watch her grow up through the eyes of my son. In a lot of ways the things that I feared the most, like moving on, don't seem so scary. Moving on meant that I would get further and further away from Lydia and forget more and more. But I'm finding that in moving on she still has a presence and an active role in our family. I guess we are finding C.S. Lewis's words to be so very true, "A pleasure is not fully grown until it is remembered." Tonight we stopped in the hallway to look at Lydia's picture. We talked for a minute about Lydia and how she's a baby princess (he's into the idea of prince and princesses lately). We talked about how she is his sister and that she lives with Jesus. Wrapping things up, I said, "say night-night". He said, "Night-night, Wydia, I wuv you." My heart smiled and my eyes cried a little. We choose to allow her to grow through our memory. We continue to love her as we move on taking our love for her with us every step of the way. Moving on doesn't seem so scary anymore.