She was laid across my chest, ungently, and rubbed with a blanket as she lay there, pink and bellowing. Her cry was like a kittens, fierce and soft at once. The room was full of people, of color, of blurring faces and words tossed about.
I saw none of it. I heard none of it. My eyes were her eyes, my world the soft focus of her face.
I looked at the redeemer God had placed in my world and in my care. The one sent to give me purpose and fulfill my heart's aches and voids.
She was, and because she was, I became more than I was.
Her hand laid in mine that night, soft and sheltered in the blooodstained and curvy valleys of my own. Her fingernails no bigger than a pea, her feet smaller than my pinky. She was so small, so fragile, and at once so big in my life that she took the air from me.
And her eyes. Sloped upward away from her perfect blunted nose. Opening rarely in those first few days, but always on mine when they did. I saw her for the first time in those days, but I knew her forever.
This was what I had ached for, wished for, and dreamed of. She was the harbor to a storm tossed vessel. I found my counterpoint and my compass all at once, on her tiny body. I whispered how far I had come in her pink ear, curled like a perfect shell under my lips. I touched her eyes, her cheeks, her elbows and toes, marveling at the detail God gives.
He forgets nothing. No part of her body was immune to the perfection He gives.
She was so innocent and so vulnerable. And mine.
She was given to love, and to heal, and to raise me from what circumstance had taught me.
And now, now that sweet fragile being is still the focus of my life. Her voice and face my every waking thought.
Our days are layered now with tension, with negotiation, with arguments. She is 4. I am 34. And we both know what's right.
But the moments when she is laying across me, her head on my chest... when her hand curls into mine and I trace her fingertips, placing a kiss in each palm...when I whisper into her sleeping ear of how far we have come, and of what she saved me from...
These are the times I know we are just a breath away from that one small moment, precious and extraordinary only to me, when she was laid across my chest and we breathed the same air, and I looked at her and thought...
Yes, you are the one. I have missed you all my life. And now you are here.
My sweet Lily girl, love of my heart and soul. You were born to make me whole. You are loved beyond imagining. And you have raised me up so gently into this role of mother. You have blessed me. May I always bless you, too.
