What lies beneath the surface

    I had an interesting thing happen this afternoon. I was at the pool with a friend and she had fallen asleep while I swam my laps. I happened to venture over to a few of the moms and strike up a conversation. These are women that I see all the time around the community but have never taken the time to talk to, so I guess I was just feeling froggy. Anyways, we were discussing men and our children and I had a very strong urge to bring up my Leo. I have yet to bring him up to anyone except my mom and boyfriend so I was also feeling brave. It was so weird the urge to say something about him. It was almost as if I would explode if I didn't say his name and tell these women that I should have two sons here instead of just one. I blurted out that I was pregnant with a son and he should have been almost here but he was born dead in April. Just like that. Word for word. One of the ladies stopped in her tracks and started apologizing to me profusely. I explained to her that it was ok and she didn't need to say she was sorry anymore, I just wanted to bring him up so he could be remembered right then. She understood I guess but it was the other woman that surprised the shit out of me.
   Now it must be mentioned I have seen this lady a million times and always thought to myself that she seemed so happy and I looked at her with her singleton daughter and assumed that she wanted an only child. Today she blew my mind. She looked at me and said ,"you know, before I had my daughter that you see right here, I gave birth to a full term daughter that was born dead. They never figured out why it happened." It blew me away. I would never have thought that she was a fellow dead baby mother. Like I said before, she always seemed so happy go lucky and content with her daughter, I assumed that was how she wanted it. It wasn't. She talked to me right there in front of the other moms about the pain she felt and how sad it still made her sometimes. We had a moment where it was just the two of us amidst a crowd. Everyone else disappeared and we connected on a level neither of us wished we could.
     I realized how often I judge other people by the face they put on for the public. At no point would I have ever known she was filled with grief from a loss so intense. Who knows what people are hiding inside. You never know what kind of pain is lying just beneath the surface of a seemingly perfect exterior. Yet another very important lesson Leo is teaching me on this road through my new found life.