For today.

 I want so much to write about the gift Daniel is in my life and how today was just another beautiful testimony to his life, but today just wasn't the case at all. Today was imperfectly, humanly, insanely {ab}normal. Today, I just can't be that positive, half-full-in-the-face-of-tragedy kind of person. I woke up angry that Ryan had to work today. That I was marking Daniel's second birthday away from me. That to try and picture a five year old Daniel's face is beyond something I can imagine. That today, more then anything, I just wanted to crawl away from reality. 

Death and loss and pain and emptiness has been in the forefront of my mind this week. Sandy Hook and those kids and families. Mary-as in Jesus' mother.  The story we all share. Wondering what it all means. My mind and heart are working on something, but I just need to be right now. I know once I am outside of this storm, I truly will have appreciated the lesson being formed from my thoughts, but for now, I just want to awknowledge that I am a mother missing her oldest. That on a fifth birthday, I put balloons (two initially but then Andrew got ahold of one; I'll smile at that later) on a grave. I made cookies instead of a birthday cake. I cleaned a house and did a million loads of laundry. I separated two fighting brothers and wished so badly they would get why my heart just wasn't in to much today. That every so often, I would glance at the time and remember five years ago, what Ryan and I were doing as a new family of three. And then wishing my family of five didn't have such a huge ethereal rip in it.  That to celebrate a birthday where Daniel wasn't present was too much for me this year.

I miss him. Plain and simple. And today was just a reminder that I have so many more birthdays to work through until I can see him again. 

I am breaking down walls and building stronger ones in the wake of all of this. But, for today, I just need to let them crumble.