Today my beautiful, perfect baby girl would be 6 months old. 6 months old. That is a lifetime.

I try and imagine how life could have been, what she may have looked like, what her personality may have been like by now. Try and remember the typical milestones that babies meet, which vaguely sit deep in my memory from 7 years ago with Sophie. But it is hard. It is hard to imagine something that never lived outside the womb. It is hard to see who a person could have been never having seen her eyes, never heard her cry, never felt her snuggle.

Sometimes I imagine dark curls starting to come in like Charlotte's curls, and other times it is bald and beautiful like Sophie was at that age. I imagine the chaos that would be settling down in our house as we would have moved out of the newborn stage and maybe would be getting some sleep.

Mostly I imagine the joy my soul would feel despite the pain of losing Charlotte. Sometimes it feels like the world forgets that she was ever here because no one knew her like I did inside my stomach, because she never took a breath of air, never cried, never looked me in the eyes. To the world I am not 6 months post partum, I am just me, and 38-year-old mom with a 7 year old (and two daughters in Heaven).

Losing Maggie changed me in a way that I can hardly explain. Charlotte broke my soul, but Maggie cracked it open. Most days I don't know who I am anymore - I look in the mirror at old pictures and see the sparkle of life that I am so desperately chasing gone from my eyes. Right now the cracking open of my soul is paralyzing and suffocating, but I know without a doubt that good things are going to come from it.

It is allowing me to shed the person I thought I was supposed to be and become the person I was meant to be. I don't think I was a bad person - at least most of the time I tried my hardest to be the best I could be, but I also in addition tried my hardest to be the person who fit in, who people liked. I worried myself sick over the thoughts of people, what they were thinking about what I said, what I looked like, what I wore, what I did. I have invested a lot of time and money most of my life trying to be the person I thought fit in with everyone else. Let me tell you this is an exhausting, expensive, and depressing thing to do because one can never be "good enough" for someone else if you aren't "good enough" for yourself.

I often think about the night Maggie died inside my womb, and think about if I had died. Would I have liked the person I was when I died, would I have done all the things I wanted to, treated all people the way I wanted, or been the best person I could be? Many reading may be shouting YES to these questions, but my answer is profoundly a NO!

I would have died someone who not only didn't like myself very much, but also didn't do many things that I wanted to do because I preferred to go along with the crowd. Most importantly I have a profound feeling that there is something bigger meant for my soul, I don't know what it is or if I will ever know what it is until I get the gates of Heaven and look back and say "now that is why I lived and they didn't", but sometimes it consumes me - trying to figure out who the real me is.

The first part of working on this is shedding the skin I have worn for almost 38 years, and allowing my true self to emerge. This is an incredibly painful process. It involves a self reflection on the way I have lived my life the past 38 years, the things I wish I would have done differently, or even the things I would have actually done. It involves acknowledging the low self worth I have given myself on this Earth, which in itself is incredibly sad. This layer unwrapping and facing the true me is a huge process, and each layer brings along with it a new layer of grief and sadness with losing my girls that I have neatly tucked away. It is easy to get caught up in a pity party for myself and the loss of my girls, what is harder is sitting down and accepting who I am, who I have become because of them, and because of the loss of their human life.

6 months old. I honestly cannot imagine what it would have been like with her in our life. When I try my heart feels like it might explode of sadness and I have to fight the urge to run far, far away. Sometimes life feel so, so unfair, however I know that this cracking of the soul, this unraveling of who I am supposed to be is going to make me into the best person I can possibly be on this Earth and give me all the capabilities to do the things that I am supposed to do. And I am working, so, so hard to pull out of this darkness, to lift my head above the water, to breath, to live, and to be happy. Not only for myself but for my beautiful angel on Earth Sophie and Junji.

My Maggie Grace....I am sorry that I could not save you, I am sorry that the world could not know you, that I am the only one on Earth who knew you from the inside, I am sorry that my body failed you in the most horrific way.

I know you are safe and sound with your big sister and grandpas in the glory of Heaven, and for this I rejoice, but I miss you with all my heart and wish I could have had more time. I always wish for more time.

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