Precious moments. We’ve all had them—those moments that make your heart catch every time you remember them. No matter how often you revisit them, they never get stale or lose their power. Tender or funny, poignant or inspiring, they fortify us against toddler tantrums and pubescent (and pre-school) power struggles.
Leave a comment sharing your moment—or, if you’re feeling ambitious enough to write a whole post (or want to link from your own blog), email me and I’ll use your story as the moment of the day.
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Not all motherhood moments are happy ones. With her multiple hospitalizations, Julianna has been the occasion of plenty of moments whose power do not fade. Some of them were beautiful, like the St. Patrick’s Day when we baptized her in the P-ICU. Others still make me shudder with dread, like the moment when I realized what it means when an ICU room fills up with people. (It’s Corrie Ten Boom’s suitcase, again. Thank God I didn’t realize what it meant until her sats had quit dropping into the 40s!)
But the most poignant of these came on a day when we went to church without her. I don’t remember which hospitalization it was—only that it was at a time before we started sending her to the nursery when we played, so we were used to her always being with us. We had sent Alex to Sunday school in an attempt to give him a sense of normalcy. It was the first time since before children that we had attended Mass together alone.
Julianna was on the sick list, of course, and I braced myself for hearing her name in the prayers of the faithful. But sometime later during Mass, as Christian and I knelt side by side, the overwhelming sense of what was missing swept through me, and the tears started pouring out. Christian put his arm around me, and I knelt there in the bright, warm light of incandescent bulbs on mauve carpet and blond wood, weeping for the ache inside.
This morning, as I listen to Julianna whining on the toilet upstairs, begging to get off, and face taking Alex to the doctor for a dislocated elbow, this memory serves as a reminder of how blessed I am, even when it feels otherwise.
Kathleen M. Basi 
A beautiful, sad, poignant moment. Thanks for sharing.
I look at the beautiful pictures of your children and my own daughter’s precious face and with you I say: Yes…we are truly blessed.