happy birthday, alyssa!

thirty-one years ago today our daughter, alyssa, entered this world - a beautiful baby with blonde peach-fuzz for hair. do you know that because of a strained relationship with my mother i had been in counseling for most of my pregnancy as a result of the 'fear of having a daughter'. the fear of not knowing how to be a mother to a daughter. my desire was to love her unconditionally, embrace her individuality, celebrate her spirit and simply find joy in who she was and who she would become.

i had experienced a still-birth 5 years before she was born. at 8 months gestation, due to an insufficient placenta. in those days when a dead baby arrived, it was quickly whisked away to some phantom nursery (morgue) never to be seen again. it was not mentioned. it was as if it had never existed. nurses didn't linger bedside to comfort and talk it out. oh, they were nice enough but 36 years ago there was that belief that if you didn't talk about it, you could pretend it didn't really happen. the live babies that were brought to other mothers at routine times of the day passed my room, their cries of hunger piercing the silence of my room. the baby who was cradled in his mother's arms as we rode together in the elevator down to the lobby was gently put in a carseat for the ride home. i waited for my husband to bring the car around to the front, our carseat noticeably absent. the nurse standing behind my wheelchair never uttered a word.

so when alyssa arrived, i immediately fell in love. the symptoms were so acute, it was truly like i was lovesick as i could not eat for 2 weeks. i hardly put her down; i fed her and then rocked her, almost until the next feeding. she hardly cried - heck, she never had to (and you know, after a while when i DID put her down she hardly cried - i like to think it was because the first couple of months of her life she laid so close to my heart for so many hours of the day - just as she had for 9 months. when her brother arrived she was only 27 months old. one day when he was about 3 weeks old she somehow wrestled him out of the swing and carried him across the tile floor to me in the kitchen. "he was crying" she told me. after i started breathing again, i thanked her for loving her brother so much. she was spirited. by the time she was two years old she would NOT wear velvet and would NOT wear anything with smocking on it. that pretty much lasted through her entire childhood and adolescence. she had her own sense of style and i always thanked God that we never fought any battles about her choice of dress - she was modest and appropriate. whew!

we experienced the normal ups and downs of parenting and there were good times and bad times but there was never any question of how much i loved my daughter. there was NOTHING she could have done that would ever have diminished my love for her - no matter what it was.

i love to write and i have written a newspaper column in years past. but my daughter has surpassed me in skills and the depth of her writing. i am speechless now to express how much i love her and how proud i am of her. this experience we are going through right now is the most painful i've ever been through. i hurt for her more than i ever hurt for myself. i feel each and every emotion she expresses. i feel the joy she expresses and the pain. because we are separated by hundreds of miles, i read her blog daily and experience her anxiety, her joy and her hope. maybe that is because i held her next to my heart for so many hours and days when God first sent her to our family.

"before i held you in my arms, i held you in my heart. that is where you began and where you will always be." (unknown)

happy birthday, alyssa! we love you!