Birth Day

When Mr. Moon and I got together, we got busy. By the time we'd been married for one year, we had a one-month old and a business.
Well, I had the child. He had the business.
We both knew we wanted a baby and he knew he needed to start a business in order to support us. He did his part in the baby-making and I did...uh, nothing, in the business.
This was because
(a) I had a nine-year old, a seven-year-old, and a new-born, and
(b) My business sense was in direct inverse proportion to my ability for procreation.

We were both, Mr. Moon and I, thirty-one years old when Lily was born. I thought I was a pretty experienced baby-haver and mama.

And the universe laughed and laughed.

Lily was my fastest birth. Only about fourteen hours of labor. But the child weighed over ten pounds and she had her little hand up by her head which I knew because I could feel it down there, punching my bladder for the last few weeks. It took me a very long time to push her out and when her head finally emerged, her shoulders got stuck. This is a very, very serious problem and can lead to all sorts of problems, including death. But the midwife was fast-thinking and had me flip over to hands and knees (the Gaskin maneuver) and Lily was born. She needed resuscitation. She was blue, she was still.
It was scary.
Outside the day was as beautiful as a day in late September can be. A day like today, in fact. Crystal clear of sky and air and there were lavender roses by the bed and a cradle, hand-made by her papa lay in wait.
Here's what Hank remembers about that day:

The day you were born, May and I stayed home from school. Mom was in labor, and we played out back all day. We pretended to have a traveling cart, with a team of horses, and we kept ourselves entertained while Mama did her job. Dad had made a screened porch into a master bedroom, and that's where you made your appearance. We didn't know your name until Mama used it to conjure you. 

And that's exactly what I did. While our midwife was giving my baby oxygen, she said, "Talk to her. She needs to hear her parents."

And so, even though we had not settled on a name, I called to her. I said, "Lily Rose. Breathe. We love you." And we touched her and she took a breath and she wailed and she wailed and turned rosy pink and the room became clearer and joyful and we all laughed and I took her to my breast and there she was. Perfect and fat and pink and gorgeous and sturdy and strong and given a name. 

Lillian Rose Moon. 

And Hank and May were called in from the backyard to come and greet their new baby sister and I was delirious with joy and determined NEVER GO THROUGH LABOR AGAIN and her father was so happy that when I told him we were never having sex again, he accepted that, and his parents came to see her and they were so pleased and even my mother was there and she took Hank and May to Wendy's and brought us back hamburgers and they were the best hamburgers ever eaten on this planet in the history of all hamburger-eating. That night Lily slept in the bed with us, and it was a miracle every time Lily moved and breathed and nursed and her father and I barely slept, too incredibly stoned on the sheer wonder of her being there between us. I had never loved him so much. 

And today is a day like that one was. Cool and clear and I am thinking of that birth, thinking of that baby, all grown up and a mama times two herself.  I am thinking of the sheer wonder of it all again. The love that ignited the spark of life, the pain and work of labor, the glory of that day, the fear when she did not breathe, the joy when she did. 

Every time I've ever had a baby I felt with their births as if I had been reborn myself. If there is one thing on this earth I am proud of, it is that I know in my heart that I started my children off right, having them at home where the love that got them in there got them out and they were born in love and received in love and they have known love their entire lives and are able now to give and receive love knowing that it is their birthright. 

They were birthed right. 

Happy birthday, Lillian Rose Moon, daughter of my womb, mother of my grandchildren, friend of my heart, glory on this earth. 

It is a beautiful day. And it is Vergil's birthday too. Today is the anniversary of the day he was born and who knew that a little baby boy, born on a mountain in North Carolina in his own mama's bed would grow up and fall in love with my last baby (yes, I did have sex again) and make her so happy and I just sent his mother an e-mail thanking her for bringing him into the world and raising him so right. 

Well, I'm all teary again. 

I've had a walk. There is not one cloud in the sky. My only sorrow is that I had to take down the web of a Golden Orb weaver because it was right in the path of where we walk to get to the clothesline, the hen house. 

I waited until she was safely on that red bucket and I feel bad because I hated to undo her work but I really do not want to run into her when I go to shut the chickens up in the twilight. 

It seems cruel to be mean to a mama today but she can build another web.

I am thinking of all the women who are laboring right this second to bring their own babies into the world. I am sending them and their children love. I am astonished at the way this works, the miracle of it, every time. I would wish with all of my heart that every baby born, every day, is born into love.

What a beautiful day.

Happy Birth Day to us all, even as we are merely reborn into each new day, and especially to Lily and to Vergil.

Love...Mama

Next, Lily's Birthday

It was a good birthday party. There were lots of vegetables and cheese and crackers and a salad and pizza and a yummy cake and ice cream. And presents galore which Owen opened one at a time, all by himself, and squealed with joy and he got boots that he put on immediately and a giant soft elephant and a monkey man doll that his mama made him

and a drum and mallets

that he only wanted to rest his arms on but which he did not want to give up to open the next present and a drum set and an easel and books and stickers and puzzles and , and, and....

He got a tricycle and a red wagon from Bop and Mer.

Figuring out the pedals is going to take some time. He can already do the bell though.
Of course.

Buddy Waylon was there with his mama Shayla and he was a very polite young man and tolerated the fact that Owen was getting one present after another with more grace than I would have managed. They sat together to eat pizza and ice cream. They are beautiful boys.

That's Waylon and Mama Shayla. Daddy Billy couldn't make it. Tummy illness. We missed him fiercely.

The best part for me was when it was time for the cake. Owen's been getting ready for this cake situation for quite some time. He knows how to blow out the candles. And when we told him it was finally and at last, time to have cake, he grabbed me and wanted to sit on my lap, which he did, and they brought in the cake and we all sang Happy Birthday to him and he blew out the candles with great skill and determination. None of those pictures came out, but here he is right after.

He knows how to lick the candles as they come off the cake, too.
He's too young to make a wish so I made one for him.
More. More and more and more.
That was my wish.

And now it's getting on time to Lily's birthday. It was about this time twenty-six years ago that I woke up and lay quietly, feeling that familiar feeling of the uterus beginning it's powerful rhythmic dance. I got up and went outside and sat on the steps and looked up at the stars and knew it had begun. I did not call the midwife or even wake my husband, but waited until I was certain sure.

She was born about five the next afternoon- my shortest labor by far.
I labored in the house and in the yard where Hank and May had built a town in the camellia bushes and played as I walked the perimeter of the yard with Mr. Moon. When it was finally time to deliver her, the midwife and I had to do some fancy steps to get her out. Over ten pounds, that brawny child had her hand up by her head, increasing the difficulty and there was shoulder dystocia but I flipped over to hands and knees and she was born and the midwife had to get her going. It was scary, but then she began to breathe and she was fat and healthy and took to the ninny right away and it was heaven and a miracle and friends were with me and champagne was drunk and pineapple juice and the joy of her cry rang throughout the world or at least, in my heart it did.

Well.

The cake is out of the oven. It sits in three pans, tomorrow to be three layers and it is so rich with chocolate and with lemon peel and orange peel, just enough.
It is the season of cakes and of birth and of change of season and of that wavery line which gets so thin at solstice times. The curtain can almost part and glimpses gotten of a woman squatting, of great effort being made, of a woman's face begging for help and I remember that when I finally, finally quit fighting the process and began to chant, "I love you, baby, come on baby, I love you baby, come on baby," she descended and made her way into life.

Sometimes you have to coax that spirit into being not just with blood and muscle and the shifting of bones but with words too.

I don't know.

It worked for me.

Beautiful Lily was born, beautiful Lily has given birth and will do it again.

Good work I did that day, twenty-six years ago.

I hope her cake turns out well. I am so glad she was born. I love her so much, my Lily girl.

A Birthday Filled With Her Light

It's Miss Maybelle's birthday today and I wrote about her birth-day last year and if you'd like to go back and read about a hippie home birth which occurred in Lloyd, Florida in 1978, you can find that story right here.

That was a good day, that one. The day my second child was born. All the days my children were born were the best days of my life. Those were the days the curtain parted and the "other" universe was revealed in a flash and a life safely slipped through from there to here and ended up in my arms, at my breast, and being a conduit for that sort of cosmic occurrence is something you neither forget nor take for granted.

And it's a heavy, heavy responsibility when we are given the honor of becoming the mother of a child. There are so many reasons to have a baby but none of them are good enough to actually explain why we do it. THAT'S how heavy the responsibility is. That's how heavy the potential for tragedy is because if we somehow lose that life, then there is no going back and every mother (and father, for that matter) who has lost a child has a certain look about them, a darkness of heart that never goes away. Ever.

When Miss Maybelle was fifteen years old she was hit by a car and when I got that call (Mrs. Moon, your daughter's been in an accident) one of the most immediate reactions I had was to wish I'd never had children because I could not bear it if she died. I could not bear it.

Thank every power that be she did not die and she is whole and she is healthy and she is so strong. So very strong. Although her bones hurt her every minute of the day and night, she is strong and whole. Probably stronger than she would have been had she never been hit by that car but I would gladly trade a little weakness for her never having to have gone through that.

Other things have threatened Miss Maybelle's life and if you've read her blog, you'll be able to figure out some of them. And I don't know why I'm thinking of those things today instead of merely (merely!) the glory of her birth, the first moment I held her, the way I studied her face in wonder, every bit as amazed at the miracle of her as I was at the miracle of my first born.
I'm thinking about that, of course, but I'm also thinking about what a hard road she's had to travel. She doesn't do anything the easy way. She wouldn't have been hit by the car if she'd taken the easy way to school- riding the bus instead of walking the miles to get there. Something I knew she shouldn't be doing but letting her do it because we were at that very hard place of mother and daughter and I was trying so hard to pick my battles wisely and in this case, I had chosen wrongly. I hadn't protected her and thus, her life was nearly ended and I would never have been able to live with the knowledge of that.

But you know- we can't hold our babies in our arms forever. We have to let them take those first tentative steps into the world and we have to let them run when they are able.
And no matter what we do or how hard we try to protect them and shield them and warn them and give them the information and skills they need to make it in the world as a fully-realized human adult, we can't prevent them from running down paths which are not safe, which are fraught with peril, which are lit incandescently with the promise of something worth the risk and they go and they have to explore and sometimes they go down the rabbit hole and if we're lucky, they remember to reach out a hand before the slip down entirely.

I'm not sure where I'm going with this. I want to talk about how incredibly proud I am of this child for pulling herself out of places that so many people never come out of. I want to talk about what strength and purpose she has. I want to talk about how I can't tell her that enough and how every day she becomes more beautiful. How smart she is, how full of wisdom and humor and talent. How if there were a fire in this house, I would grab the book she made me when she was still a child because it's the most valuable thing I own and then I would frantically reach for the dolls she's made me, the pictures she's painted me, the gourd she carved me, the Madonnas and mermaids she's made me. Those are the things I could hardly bear to lose.

But the thing I really couldn't bear to lose is her.
Her voice on the phone. "Hey Mama!" she always says. The long talks we have, the conversations about books and hopes and dreams, the way we tell each other jokes and the dirtier the better. The way our brains are so similar, the way her body feels when I hold her, as precious to me now as it was when I first held her.

We were talking yesterday and we were discussing a fella. "When he looks at me," she said, "I think he sees this beautiful and really smart girl and I'm just a regular girl."

Oh honey, I think.
Oh honey.

This past year has been one of huge growth for Miss Maybelle and she's working her way down some paths which are hard. Hard, I tell you! And she's doing that joyfully and with her eyes open and instead of the promise of heady risk, those paths promise only more hard work and quiet sobriety. One step at a time, she's walking down them. Not running towards a gaudy false light, but walking towards a sincere and true place, her way lit by stars and candles and mostly by the light of her soul, the inextinguishable light of her soul.

How I wish I were the magical Maria Luna of her picture so that I could have prevented her from the pain she's gone through. The physical, the emotional, the spiritual.
But I am not.
I am merely her mama.
Greatest honor of my life.

And of these days she's going to let some fella look at her with those eyes that say, "You are the most beautiful woman in the world, and the smartest, too," and she's going to relax into that and think, "Hey. This is the way I'm supposed to be seen," and when she falls in love with herself, she'll fall in love with the fella who reflects that in his eyes.
When she knows herself and sees the light of her soul, then she'll let love in.

Mr. Moon says that we fall in love when we see the reflection of ourselves we want to be in the eyes of someone else. He is very wise, that Mr. Moon.
I've been looking into those eyes of his for all these years and even though I don't think I'm actually the person I see reflected there, I surely want to be and he gives me the strength to try to be and when he sees himself reflected in my eyes, I think he sees the person he is trying to be.
We are all striving, we are all trying.

Miss Maybelle more than anyone else I know.

I remember looking into her newborn eyes and seeing the entire universe. The deep place from which all life springs.

That's still what I see when I look into her eyes.

I see the reflection of my better self, I see the depths of her.

And what I wish for her in this next year of her life is that she continues on the paths she is taking. That she learns to run on them, that she is able to run up the highest hill and know the strength of her body, her spirit, her heart. Know the unlimitless power of her determination and breath. To know that there is nothing which can stop her because she is, well, she is my May.

That we are here behind her, beside her, around her. Her daddies, her mothers, her brother, her sister, and whoever else she chooses to hold her hand out to.

And we are blessed by her light. And that we are so grateful she is learning to appreciate that.

My May. My solid piece of starlight, made visible and born into my arms thirty-one years ago today.

Happy birthday, my darling.
I love you. Thank-you for being here.
Thank-you for being strong.
Thank-you for the heart you share with us and the light you shed on us.

Look into our eyes and let us reflect some of that back on to yourself. Your glorious, shining self.
Happy birthday. You are busy being born.
I stand in wonder. I have counted your toes, I have looked into your eyes.

I have found you perfect. I have declared you whole, you strong, beautiful woman. My friend forever, my child, my baby. My May.

The First Best Day Of My Life, Thirty-Two Years Ago

Keep your attention in the here-and-now. Don't past-trip. Putting your attention in the past means that here-and-now is continuing on without you.
Stephen Gaskin.

Every morning I wake up dissatisfied and at least slightly despairing. It is my way. On the best days I shake these feelings off quickly and move on but some days they linger, as if they'd taken root in my bones, my heart, my blood.

Today seems to be one of those days.

I keep thinking about how thirty-two years ago today I was holding my first just-born baby in my arms.

I was twenty-one years old, barely a woman, and a just-born mother, so frighteningly full of love for the baby I was holding that the universe was hardly big enough to contain it and indeed, as I looked into that baby's eyes, held that baby's body to mine, my thoughts did race outward to the celestial.

I thought of stars in space as I looked into the infinite depths of my baby's eyes.

And today I think back on myself, holding that baby and I am still in wonder at the magnificent way our hearts have evolved to love another that much. I still think that it is somehow the force that holds this whole thing together- that sort of love. It is that powerful. It can bend light, it can cause gravity to loosen its hold, it can affect the spin of the planets in their orbits.

And yet here I am today, thirty-two years later, looking back, and my heart is heavy.

I am, as Stephen Gaskin says, past-tripping.

I think of that girl, that just-born mother and how her heart trembled on the verge of jumping out of her chest with the jolting joy of her baby's new life. I remember how she pressed her mouth to her baby's ear and made every sort of promise to that baby in a breathy whisper. The moon, the stars, a life filled with more sweetness and light than any human being's life has ever held.

And of course, I was not able to fulfill those promises. I was only human, tethered to earth with all its myriad complications, its rules of physics, its laws of gravity, perhaps loosened for a moment with the hugeness of my love, but which soon settled back into its normal unyielding demands, its heaviness of reality.

And my heart fills now, thinking of this.

Perhaps it is a strange form of bi-polar disorder, stretched out over the course of three decades. Or perhaps it is just the complete and utterly disorienting realization that thirty-two years have passed since that day and where am I? What am I doing?

Young hippie mother in love with her first baby to old hippie mother still in love with that baby, but weary now. So weary some days of the millions of minutes made up of the minutiae of my life.

The dishes need washing.
The laundry needs doing.
The dogs need feeding.
We're out of cereal, the pump is broken, the garden needs watering, the books need writing, the floors need sweeping, the heart needs mending, the spirit needs tending, the thousand tiny cuts need binding.

How did I get from that holy room, holding that holy child, my holy heart so full of light that I'm sure it registered in the mind of God to being so old and worn out?

It has happened so fast. At the speed of unbent light. No. Faster than that.

And I can't go back. I can't whisper warnings in that young mother's ear about this choice, or that. I can't tell her to trust herself more, to stand up for what she knew was right, to open her eyes to blinding truths, to be wary, to be stronger, to be aware that time, even as she held that baby, her milk not even come in yet, was flowing so fast that it would drown her if she let it.

I can't go back and change anything, nor would I. It doesn't work that way, nor should it. I would not interfere with that woman's hopes and dreams and innocence for anything in the world. That was a perfect moment, just as it was.

I am here. That baby is here. He is grown up. He is a man. He is someone I am prouder of than I could ever have imagined thirty-two years ago. His path has been a hard one but he has strong shoulders and strong legs and he is confident as he walks.

He taught me about love, that first second of his life.

He teaches me about strength, every second of his life.

He is here, he is now, he is perfect.

And if there are regrets in my heart about anything, anything at all, none of it has to do with him. Or with his sisters, either, except for this:
I wish, oh babies, I wish- I could have done better by you sometimes. I do.

I wish I could have done better by me sometimes, too.

But here we are.

And it's time to pull myself away from the past and get on with the here-and-now. It needs my attention. While I am here, I have to give it. That's the deal we make when we're born, when we give birth.

There is the holy light of love and there are the diapers that need changing.
There is the magnificent tsunami of joy and there are the endless nights of colic and weeping.
There is the perfect plan of life and there are the regrets.
They are all part of it, aren't they?

We continue on.

We celebrate.

Happy birthday, Son.
Thank-you for the lessons. Thank-you for being my here-and-now for all these years.

I still think of the stars when I think of you.

And my heart lightens and rises up and I go on.

She's The One Who Looks Like Me. Only Prettier. And Filled With Light.

Today is Bob Dylan's sixty-seventh birthday but I'm not his mama and as such, I don't have a birth story to go along with with his special day but I am the mama of another child born on this day, thirty years ago. I believe I've written about the births of every one of my children except for my May's and today would be the day.
May was my second baby and I remember distinctly the moment I figured out I was pregnant with her. I was digging a ditch through the hard red clay on the property where her dad and brother and I were living, right here in Lloyd, about four miles down the road from where I live now. I was digging the ditch to lay a water line to run to my washing machine.
For some reason, it struck me as I dug that I was feeling a bit...pregnant.
I know that sounds vague, but I'd been pregnant enough already (besides being pregnant with Hank, I'd had a miscarriage before I got pregnant with May) to know the feeling and what it meant.
I don't think I stopped digging but just registered the feeling and went on with my digging. If indeed I was pregnant, the sooner we got that washing machine hooked up, the better.
We were living then in a 10 by 50 single-wide trailer and I was feeling proud of the fact that I had running water, which I had not had in the house we were living in before we moved the trailer onto our land. That house had been a lovely old thing and we paid the royal sum of seventy-five dollars a year to rent it (and that's not a misprint and I am not making it up) but like I said, it had no running water and it had no heat and it was hotter than an oven in summer and colder than an igloo in winter and the floors weren't level and you could see the outside from the inside inbetween the boards but I loved it anyway. We pumped water with a hand pump and hauled it in for cooking and drinking and we had an outhouse.
It was the outhouse that led to us moving to the trailer. One morning in the midst of a terrible hay fever attack I woke up and took my miserable self to the outhouse and while in there I got stung by a wasp at the exact same time I saw a snake at my feet. The resulting hysteria led to going trailer shopping that very day. Our plan had been to build a house on our property before we moved there but I could see that this house-building was going to take a while and frankly, I needed a bathroom.
By the time May was born, we were settled into the trailer quite nicely. It was small but I liked it as well as you could like a trailer. The bathroom was probably the biggest room in the house and that made me happy. Plus, we not only had running water, we had an air conditioner in the bedroom and if that wasn't living high on the hog, I don't know what is.
Two days before May was born I was in that bathroom in the early morning when my water broke. Yippie! I thought, the baby will be here soon! but as hard as I tried I could not get my contractions to start. I drank tea made of black cohosh which is about the nastiest-tasting substance on earth and took my nine-plus month pregnant self for a run down the dirt road but still no contractions.
By that afternoon I decided to give up the effort for awhile and laid down for a nap with instructions to my husband to watch Hank who was playing outside with his little Fisher Price farm. I had just gotten to the deep part of sleep when the man, in a state of great agitation, woke me to tell me that he couldn't find Hank.
That's a whole story in itself but he was finally found down the road, all the way across Highway 158 which is the same road I live on now, naked as a jaybird and accompanied by our two bull dogs. I promptly went into hysterics and carried him home, crying all the way, and that as much as anything probably got me really started in labor.
I labored all the next day with my midwife friends checking in on me and by dark, they came and settled in to stay the night. I am a slow, slow baby-haver.
My main midwife had another lady on "simmer" and she had to leave in the middle of the night to go deliver that baby and it was just as she was pulling up in her little VW Beetle at dawn that May started to make her appearance.
I can't say that her birth was easier than my first but the pushing-out part surely was. I don't think I pushed three times before her little body slid out and I was able to see who I'd been toting around inside for all those months. I'd honestly thought I was having a boy so it was with some surprise that I discovered she was a girl and I didn't have a name for her but I'd been thinking about "May" for some reason (uh? it WAS May) and my brave and hard-working midwife's name was Ellen so she was named May Ellen. We came to find out after we'd named her that her grandmother on her father's side was named May and her mother's name was Ellen, so there you go. Meant to be.
Now here's the funny thing: I had spent my entire pregnancy with May feeling huge amounts of guilt because I knew in my heart that there was no way I would ever be able to love any child the way I already loved Hank. Just wasn't possible. And so I thought she'd be born cheated and that thought gave me grave concern. But what I learned the second she was born was that the human heart (or at least the mother's human heart) is not limited in the amount of love it can hold and as soon as I saw her precious little face and held her in my arms, I realized that all of my worry had been completely for naught and that there was possibly no end to the amount of love I could have for my babies, even if I had fifty, which I was certainly sure I would never do. In fact, I was pretty sure I'd never have another baby at all, which is what I'd thought after the first one, too. And the third, but there again, that's another story.
So I fell in love with May on that just-dawning morning in May in a single-wide trailer in Jefferson County, that holy sort of mother love which is as close to heaven as I'll probably ever know. The midwives cleaned me up and changed my sheets and then they went off home to tend to their families and my friend Lynn brought Hank home because she'd taken him for me the day before because I'd known I couldn't concentrate on birthing this child with my first baby there to need my attention too. This was the very first time Hank and I had ever been separated for so long and I doubt I would have trusted anyone in the world to take him except for Lynn and I think Hank still remembers parts of that day and night, even though he wasn't yet two and they are good memories.
So there we were, reunited as a family, the four of us, and being only twenty-three, I felt pretty good for just having given birth and for having been up for about three days in a row. We loaded up the old '55 Buick Roadmaster and drove to town for a newborn check and no one at the doctor's office could believe I'd just had a baby.
Youth is great.
We drove home and I suppose we rested some that afternoon and I still remember what I cooked for dinner that night which was oven-barbequed chicken and potatoes from the garden. It was a delicious meal that we sat down together to eat, a father, a mother, a red-headed almost-two year old, and a brand, new baby at my breast.
A feast for the body and a feast for the soul and as with my first child, I felt reborn after the birth, almost as new and pure as she was. I was frankly amazed at how well everything had gone and even more astounded that I'd given birth to this beautiful child who looked so much like Hank when he'd been born that her father said, "Well, Mary, when we make a baby, I guess that's what it looks like," which cracked the midwives up. They still resemble each other which is odd because May looks enough like me to be my clone and Hank looks like his dad.
Genetics are crazy things.
Before I got pregnant with May I kept seeing a light out of the corner of my eye. It would come and then go and of course if that happened now I'd think I had a brain tumor but in those old hippie days, I just took it as a sign that a spirit was trying to "get in" and I still think that's true. May has always had an incredibly strong spirit and is as light-filled and purposeful as anyone you'll ever meet. At the age of sixteen she was hit by a car, walking to school and I still can't talk about that without crying. Frankly, it's a miracle she's alive but she is and she works on her feet and she walks all over Tallahassee and she, like the rest of my kids, is a dancer.
She's also a writer and one of these days, she'll start blogging too and then you'll see that what I'm saying is true.
She's strong and she's smart. This past year has been one of profound and positive change for her and I am standing in amazement, watching this process. As with all my children, she has been, since the moment of her birth, one of my best and most influential teachers and we probably spend at least an hour a day on the phone, discussing everything from books to meals, but mostly just making each other laugh. Besides looking like each other, we move alike, we sound alike and we think alike. We certainly share a sense of humor.
That girl has been a joy to me for thirty years now. She's tried me- don't get me wrong. When she was nineteen she announced that she was going to travel the country in her little truck all by herself and no matter how I tried to dissuade her, she just wouldn't stop making plans.
And she did it. She got in that little truck and drove off and left me crying. This was pre-cell phone days, too, and looking back, I don't know how I stopped myself from throwing my body under the wheels of the vehicle to stop her from leaving but she did fine. There are probably some things she never told me about her journey, but she's here, she's alive, and that light I kept seeing out of the corner of my eye shines now from her own eyes and every time I see them I feel the same joy I felt the day she was born.
Happy birthday, my darling.
Thank you for bringing that light to earth through me and sharing it.
You're a gorgeous, talented woman and it's a better world because you're in it.
And you taught me about the human heart and how much love it can hold which is a lesson that still, thirty years later, is as profound and true as it was the day you taught it to me, just by being born.
Tomorrow we'll all get together for shrimp salad and key lime pie and we'll celebrate you and the day you made your way here but it's today that I'm thinking about all of this, crying a little as I write it because I'm just so glad you're here.
And that I get to be your mama.
Amen.
Happy birthday.
Shine on.