This Is Us.

So here I am firing up my computer because I just got done watching "the" episode.
You know.
This Is Us.
If you're reading this blog there's a good chance you watched that first episode and either turned it off because it was too hard~ or got sucked in for more because well... This is us. People like us.

I remember someone telling me I MUST check out the show and I'm not a huge TV watcher but I thought, OK. And right away there we are- I am watching my life- my story- unfold on the screen.

Mom goes in to deliver babies.
One baby doesn't make it.

This is me.

Recently my teenage daughter (my rainbow) started watching the show with me. With a snow-day after the Super Bowl (yay), we both got to stay up to see the infamous #Crockpot episode.

Of course we bawled like babies~ which probably isn't unique to people like us.

And then came the teaser for next week.

I saw the doctor and I put my hand to my mouth and started crying.

My rainbow didn't watch it from the beginning and she looked at me with questioning eyes. I looked at her~ with tears streaming down my face (and I'll admit a few ugly moments where I was catching my breath) and said... "They lost one of their babies. That's how the series started and that doctor knew. He knew just what to say and it brings back so many, many memories of that night with Joe and Andrew." And she cried and understood because just like this is MY story~ it's also her story. It's OUR story.

I am convinced that this show has a writer that has experienced loss. I wonder if we all (who have lost a child) had a moment with a doctor like that. I remember my doctor calling me and checking in and I remember asking her, "What made you call me to come in that day?" (I was scheduled to be induced two weeks after my due date- not one) and she said to me, "God put you in my head that day." I still think back and can remember those words like they were yesterday. They stuck with me. I was (and am) convinced that Andrew had gotten to heaven and told God, "You've got to get that doctor in so she can save my brother! So she can save my mom!!" and He did it. God put me in her head and got Andrew out when he still looked like a pink sleeping baby and got Joe out~ also wrapped in cord but alive and healthy. My doctor saved him. He saved him. That was MY doctor scene.

For those of you not familiar with the show, that first episode the doctor said:

"I like to think that one day you'll be an old man like me talkin' a young man's ear off explainin' to him how you took the sourest lemon that life has to offer and turned it into something resembling lemonade. If you can do that, then maybe you will still be taking three babies home from this hospital, just maybe not the way you planned."

And that spoke to me.
Early on I remember finding it so hard that I couldn't say I had "babies" (plural).
But eventually I did~ just not the way I had planned.

But those babies have helped me to take the sourest lemon life had to offer and turn it into so much more than anything I could have ever dreamt possible.

Andrew and E are still so much a part of me. So close to every thought.
I know that isn't everyone's story. But this is our story.

This. Is. Us.

*** And a note on that picture~ My beautiful friend snapped it years ago and last November sent it to me again. I was curious at first why she would send me that picture again and then I looked more closely. There were two "new" people in the picture (not new to ME but new to others who didn't always see "us" the way we do).

THIS is us.
How I see us.
And she even got E's pigtails the way I saw them in my dreams.

Us.