Baby Shower Invitations Quotes

Because there are few ways to memorialize the profound loss of a child who never existed, it can be an agonizingly extended grief without validation. Fresh waves of trauma are triggered by anything from watching the school bus picking up your neighbors, to a baby shower invitation in your mailbox, to the lasting legacy of not being able to brag about your grandchildren later in life. Just as Hannah pleaded with Eli, you pray people won’t harshly judge you while your heart sits shattered at your feet.

I’m trying to modify my NYPD piggishness. I have not hit on one single—or married—female in the ATTF. I was actually getting a reputation as a man who was either devoted to duty, or was devoted to some off-scene girlfriend, or was gay, or who had a low libido, or who perhaps had been hit below the belt by one of those bullets. In any case, a whole new world was opening up to me now. Women in the office talked to me about their boyfriends and husbands, asked me if I liked their new hairstyles, and generally treated me in a gender-neutral manner. The girls haven’t yet asked me to go shopping with them or shared recipes with me, but maybe I’ll be invited to a baby shower. The old John Corey is dead, buried under a ton of politically correct memos from Washington. John Corey, NYPD Homicide, is history. Special Contract Agent John Corey, ATTF, has emerged. I feel clean, baptized in Potomac holy water, reborn and accepted into the ranks of the pure angelic hosts with whom I work.

Saying I was lonely or alone in my aches would be understating the gravity of what I felt. My world reminded me constantly of my lack of club membership. For many years I was inevitably hurt by and excluded from mommy gatherings, baby showers, church moms' groups and friends' playdates. If I was invited, my exclusion quickly followed in the form of disconnection. I had nothing to offer the conversations regarding mom advice, funny kid stories, or parenting hacks. The circles I should belong to, I no longer fit into. I felt the pull of our distancing life stages. No matter how hard I tried, the club was out of reach.