Making a Sad Song Better

Dear Julian,

Monday, just a few days before your two week birthday, was the one year anniversary of our first miscarriage. It was hard to feel sad, however, with beautiful you in my arms. I held you on the back deck as Sully ran around the yard. Here in Wisconsin the grass is literally greener than it was in Iowa, and I swear, just like in the song we sing, the sky is a "deeper shade of blue." Sometimes it feels like we are living in some sort of Utopia. How on earth can we be this happy? How, in just one year, did we get from that devastating Sunday afternoon to here?

I know how we got here - through a lot of tears and grief and anger; through talking it out and laughing; through a lot of leaps of faith and a lot of trust that things will, somehow, work out. None of it was easy, but all of it was worth it.

We had a hard time deciding on your name. One day, however, the name Julian was knocking around my head. Julian of Norwich, the fourteenth-century mystic, said, "All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well." I had repeated that phrase over and over to myself over the past year, and it seemed an appropriate name for you. I asked your dad if he liked it, and he said, "Yeah, I do." Then I remembered that John Lennon had originally written the song "Hey, Jude" as "Hey, Jules" for his son Julian. The line "take a sad song and make it better" came to me. That's what you had done, Baby. Our lives were a very sad song when you appeared and, slowly, changed everything.

Your dad suggested Michael for your grandmother, and we had your name. I also like Michael because the archangel Michael was a fighter, and you and I had already waged our fair share of battles together. Also, one of the other babies had another one of the archangel's names, so I like making a connection between the two of you. I had wanted to use my brother Steven's name as a middle name, but I couldn't make it work with any of our first names. It occured to me a few weeks before you were born, however, that Steven's middle name was Michael. We had the perfect name selected for you (and no name selected for a girl version of you), so I was pretty sure you had to be a boy.

My intention is not to tie you to our losses, but to explain how your name reflects the journey we took to bring you into the world. You turned our world around. Life will not always be easy, Buddy. You will have your own days of devastation, your own impossible battles. My hope is that your name might remind you that you are a fighter and that, even before we knew you, you taught us to have faith and believe that, somehow, all shall be well.

I love you, Dear Boy.

Mama