Children keep you grounded.

If you ever want to have your heart ripped out and stomped on....or just feel like you are going to hurl up everything you have eaten in the past week....just talk to my daughter for a few minutes.

I don't mean this in a bad way so please don't take it as that.  Tonight when I was getting Gracen ready for bed, she randomly started talking about my dad...her "Poppy".  At first I thought she was talking about her great grandfather, "Pop Lynch" (whom she had spent the day with), but when I asked her she said, "No, POPPY."  She spoke briefly about the two of them playing in the backyard together and then said to me, "Mom, Poppy doesn't want to play with me anymore".  Insert knife into heart, here.

For starters, this completely shocked me because this has never come out of her mouth.  She will talk about Poppy and how he's in Heaven and with the angels and all of that but has never said anything so sad.  It makes me wonder if she has thought this all along, and it also makes me wonder how in the world I can get through to a child who is only 3 years old.  How can I get through to her that she was her Poppy's world?  How do I make sure that she knows (and Parker too) that they were the absolute apples of my Dad's eye?

I crawled into bed with her after that and silently cried my eyes out while she watched.  I told her that Poppy LOVED her and LOVED playing with her very much but that he got very sick and had to go with Jesus.  That's the best I could do, but she seemed fine with that and was rambling about something else before I knew it.  Dad often comes to me in my dreams....sometimes even right on command when I ask him.  I hope he does that for her tonight. I hope that he can visit his "Baby Girl" as she sleeps and is able to reassure her that it had nothing to do with not wanting to play. 

Just when I thought my bitterness and anger had slowly faded away, they returned within an instant.  Gracen's words, and her sweet little voice as she was saying them, will haunt me for a long time to come. I'm unloading this onto my blog, not to depress you, but to try to get out it out of my head and into words.....maybe then it'll leave me alone. 

It's Holy Thursday and tomorrow is Good Friday.  It's also my wedding anniversary.  I think this is the time of year that I miss my Dad the most.