We Fight

Some time back in a conversation, I think subsequent to one of my FaceBook posts, a few friends and I were discussing our children. We were discussing our love, our fear... our fight. At some point someone said something like "what can we do?" The response "We Fight."

"We need that on a T-shirt" my friend, yoga teacher extraordinaire, and therapist said.

Later, one of the most supportive people I've ever known, a person I've met in person all of twice but loves our family more steadily than most I see every day contacted me. She asked me to create a piece embodying that fight to be used as a fundraiser for our family. For our fight for our rainbow. For our fight for our eldest.

And I did.

And Kathryn Hager at LITTLE h CREATIVE turned it into this amazingness: 

This is for the fighters. I know there is power in our armor. This is why I wear five circlets, permanently inscribed on my skin. Two parents, three precious boys, always 5. This is why my wrists, toenails, and neck are always adorned with orange, for Damon. Why 19 orange flowers flow from my hip, where Damon sat, to my chest where he laid his head for nineteen too-short months. Life, is hard. We fight.

We fight, as a semicolon because it has come to represent the pause. A pause, a choice, to keep fighting. A pause where there could be a stop. This is the endless treatments that stave off the stop, keeping our children alive, beautiful, healing, mentally and physically. This is the quiet desperation of our tears in the silence when we are simply sure we can not keep going, then we do.

Wings of fierce protection encircle the pause. We stand guard over our precious children, buffeting the wind, providing the warmth of our love, giving them every ounce of ourselves in the moments of pause. We protect them, with everything that we are. The wings represent those guardians who encircle us as we stumble, as we cry. Those who give us space and permission and warmth to be who, and what, and wherever we need to be along our path.

We fight so many battles, illness, depression, anxiety, grief... these are just the ones intimate to my struggle. This is for the fighters and, more importantly, what we are fighting for.

You can purchase the shirt here. Please share. I know there is an army of fighters out there.

Until next time...