I’ve tried a thousand times to remember. Every year I think about it again. Where was I on the day you were born? Did I somehow know something momentous was happening in a hospital room on the other side of town? Did I feel something in my gut? In my bones? Was it truly just another day of making breakfast, and reading to my toddler, and staring at the phone, willing it to ring with news of a child that needed us?
You are so precious to me. You have changed my world so fully. I can’t fathom that the world kept spinning just the same in that moment you were born. It doesn’t seem possible everything kept going just as it always had. But try as I might, I can’t remember where I was, what I was doing, what I was feeling the day you were born.
In that moment, you were a stranger to me. Received into this world by other arms. Medical decisions made by doctors and caseworkers and a different mother. First bottles and first baths done by nurses I met so briefly and can’t remember anymore. Your height and weight written down and tiny footprints inked onto a piece of paper I treasure. All of this happened before I knew you had taken your first breath.
What I wouldn’t give to have been there with you. I wish I could have been the one to hold you when you first opened your eyes. I would have hugged your mother and told her what would always be true– that we would love you well and that we would always love her too and speak well of her for this beautiful gift of life she’s given you. I would have snuggled you close and marveled at your tiny fingers and toes. I would have cried with joy at your beauty and with a little bit of fear at the weight of becoming your caregiver for however long we were blessed with you in our lives.
I wish I could love you longer. I wish this joy I feel at being your mom could have started earlier. I wish I could have told you from the moment you were born how precious you are and how loved you are. But missing out on those first moments has made every single moment after we first saw your face all the more precious.
The phone call that described you. Learning your routines from the nurses who were caring for you. First lullabies and first feeding sessions and first times I got to dress you. They were all the more precious because we were making up for lost time. It was love at first sight, first phone call, first paperwork, first court hearing. It was love that made the hardest road the easiest to walk down.
Each birthday we are blessed to be your family, I think about that first one. The dramatic way you entered the world. The team that welcomed you in the chaos of that delivery room. The mother that named you. The nurses who cared for you in the days before I knew you. I’m thankful for all of them. And I grieve what I missed by not being there. But I can never sit in my grief. Because I get the daily joy of being your mom.
If you feel sad today too, it’s okay. If on your birthday you remember that I wasn’t there, that we weren’t a family formed in the typical way, that you were separated from what was familiar, just know that it’s okay to grieve what you’ve lost. I’m here with you in the unsettling moments of remembering the losses. Sometimes letting ourselves feel the sadness of what wasn’t can make way for the joy of what came next.
It doesn’t feel right that I don’t know where I was on the day you were born, because you are so fully my child. My world had changed, I just didn’t know it yet. But for as long as I live, I will be your mother– loving you, knowing you, caring for you, reminding you of how precious you are. I can’t go back and be there in the room the day you were born, but I can be here for all the days since the one when I first saw your face. In the sadness of what I missed, I choose to be thankful for all I’ve been given. You were worth the wait.