"All your life, you were only waiting for this moment to arise."

Once upon a time, a boy was growing inside of me.


This boy did not come to be easily. There were tears, there were questions, there were doubts. There were pills and classes and needles and nurses who held my hand while I shut my eyes tight against the glaring light of a cold, unfeeling room. Life was marked in days: day 3 bloods, day 7 bloods, day 10 bloods and ultrasound, day 12 ultrasound, day 14 bloods and ultrasound, lather, rinse, repeat. There were little pieces of plastic glaring their white blank stares back at me, thrown against the wall and then later dug out of the trash, pulled apart, and held up to the light of the window in a desperate search for some kind of sign.

Please, I offered up from my knees on the bathroom floor.

Please, I whispered while laying on the crinkly white paper of my doctor’s exam table.

Please, I begged silently while planting a soft kiss on the fuzzy head of my friend’s newborn.

Soon I stopped asking for a baby. I started asking, instead, for patience. For grace and acceptance. For forgiveness for whatever sin it was I had committed so heinous as to deny me the one thing I wanted more than anything. I looked to logic and science because emotion and soul were failing me.

And then he was there.

He was a small white flicker of a heartbeat on a grainy screen.

As he grew, I waited for the relief to sweep over me. But it didn’t come. I worried about all that I couldn’t see. Each time I visited the doctor I held my breath anxiously until I heard the reassuring heavy gallop of his heartbeat. I counted kicks. I thought about the umbilical cord and pushed words like knot out of my mind.

Please, I offered up in the middle of the night, rubbing my round belly.

Please, I whispered while standing in his empty, waiting nursery.

Please, I begged silently through three hours of pushing, please, little one. Please.

And then he was there.

As I rest his soft downy cheek against my own tear stained one, I closed my eyes, breathed him in, and offered up the only words I had left.


Thank you.