The unfortunate mother, Heather, said that she lost her young son and has since been working hard to share her important message with all parents. Heather shared her story on her social media account under the heading “The Blue Stain”. As you read it for yourself, you quickly understand why it is pulling at so many people’s heartstrings. One day, the mother was picking up some slime off the floor that her daughter had dropped. It’s then that everything became obvious to her.
Her daughter had done her best to clean up the stain left by the slime, but Heather naturally had to get in there too and help. She was, as natural for any parent, annoyed by the situation. But as she began muttering under her breath, she suddenly remembered a different stain. A stain from 14 years prior. At that time, Heather had of two-year old triplets as well as a four year old little boy. She did not have her daughter yet. On this particular evening, she was struggling to get her 4 active boys into bed. With four young children in the house, life was nothing but a tornado of activity and non-stop chaos. She spent most of the time chasing her kids — often feeling like she was facing the potential of a third world war. “My hands were full, but so was my heart.” As night drew near that evening 14 years ago, she recalled the struggle of feeding and bathing all four boys, all the while cleaning up after the usual mess.
The children had music blasting and ran around singing and dancing, full of energy as usual. This would be the last time in a while that this kind of atmosphere would prevail in the house… for several reasons. Amidst the chaos and her struggle to get the boys in bed, she looked down at the carpet and saw a large ink-blue stain. One of the triplets, Jacob, stood nearby, broken pen in hand — the ink had spread all over the carpet. It was also all over his pajamas, his body and more or less everything else in the room! “We had only lived in this house for six months and now the carpet was completely ruined. We scrubbed that stain for an hour that night, but yet it remained.”
The stain continued to get on her nerves and she was annoyed at it every time she saw it. “It made me feel angry and it made me feel like such a failure for leaving out the pen where my young son could reach it. That blue stain was just a big fat negative in my life. I hated it,” Heather says. But as her frustration over the stain continued to grow, suddenly, it all went away, in a single, life-changing moment. The little boy who had broken the pen that day was soon diagnosed with cancer. And two years following the heart-shattering news, Jacob was gone. As Jacob went to heaven, the blue stain remained. “It was still there . . . and now . . . it was a constant reminder of my son. It was a constant reminder of my frustration over something so trivial . . . something so unimportant in the scheme of life.” Heather now wants mothers everywhere to realize that young children will of course always make a mess. Raising young children can be incredibly frustrating and as they get older, a parent faces new trials and challenges. For Heather, the blue stain is now a constant reminder that life with children can be messy, but is so worth living.
