Somedays I cannot help but reflect on life.

What I’ve lived through to get to where I am today.

I think back to that naive 14 year old little girl whose world collapsed around her.  I think back to that day…  the knock at the door…  To this day I have snippets of memories which play like some sort of broken movie reel.  Really, it was the day my childhood ended, and my life’s trajectory forever altered.

I think about being a teenage girl without a mom, and without my older sister.  I’m pretty confident my high school experience wasn’t the typical experience.  I distinctly remember the day I turned older then my older sister – things that a 15 year old shouldn’t have the need to calculate or ever experience.

I think about my years in university.  My wedding to Mr. MPB.  Our travels.  Our careers.  The life we’ve worked so hard to build for our future children, assuming we’d have a few kids, never giving any thought to infertility or loss.

Which of course leads me to think about the babies we lost.  I think about the hopes and dreams we had for our family and each one of those little lives.  I still wonder who they would have been.

And then, I realize, this path I’ve walked, the bad and the good, is just what it is.  Maybe there’s some sort of divine intervention that made all these things happen to get me where I am today and where I’m going next, but I really don’t think so.  Instead, in my mind, it’s just a string of events put into motion by every person’s individual choices and decision.  Someone missed a stop sign probably because they chose not to pay enough attention to the roads.  My Dad chose to be the best single parent he could be (even if I didn’t agree with all his choices at the time).  I chose to aspire for good grades and keep living.  Mr. MPB and I chose the same university without knowing each other and ended up meeting.  Mr. MPB and I chose to pursue multiple degrees and put off having kids in favour of our education and establishing our careers.  Mr. MPB and I chose to have kids when we were ready.  Science taught us a little lesson in humility and grief, but we chose how to handle that lesson together. We chose to pursue adoption, and made about a billion adoption related choices.  As did Little MPB’s birth mother.  All of these choices, brought us together and resulted in the MPB family.  And today we choose to be the best parents we can possibly be.  (Clearly more things then this have happened, but you probably get the idea).

All of these decisions and choices, each and everyone of them, the good and the bad, lead me to where I am today.

Yet I must admit, more time then I can count, I’ve wondered what my life would have been like if the car accident didn’t happen or if my body could have provided for and sustained the lives of our little babies.  I’ve essentially wondered what how one change in decision would have altered my entire life, removing some of the hard that I’ve had to deal with.

After years of saying, I’d give anything for just one more hug with my mom or one more conversation with my sister, it’s a weird thing to realize, that I wouldn’t actually give anything, because I would never give up what I have today (as if some sort of trade were actually possible).  I simply wouldn’t trade all the good stuff, like Little MPB smiles, for just one more anything from my past.

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