To my second on her first

To my second on her first, 

I’ve spent the last 18 consecutive hours wiping away tears. You are oblivious and I’m trying real hard not to freak you out. Instead I’m video taping your every move, thinking somehow that if I can capture this wrinkle in time, I can keep it from ending. I was doomed from the beginning, really. I mean, your entrance into the world was basically perfect, and then you slept perfectly, you ate perfectly, you’ve been fussy all of five seconds in the last 366 days (God gave me an extra day by letting you be born in a leap year, bless Him.) You’ve been nothing but smiles, beauty, fun – everything I could have ever wanted. So instead of rejoicing tht you are growing up, changing, getting bigger and moving on, I am in full on mourning. I don’t want you to ever change. In the most selfish way possible, I want you to be my baby forever and ever. And yet, time has little sympathy for a mother’s heart. 

It’s crazy to me how the things that once seemed torture – never ending morning sickness, contraction after contraction, birth, exhaustion, fear – now it all seems a priviledge. I would do it over and over again, push that baby out a thousand times more to have you small again, to hold your tiny hands, kiss your soft spot.

There’s a special kind of beauty in this world – the kind that almost always hides behind trial. Its only after we process, after we heal and get our eyes back that we finally see the beauty for what it is and suddenly its all more glorious than if it had come easy. 

And yet, if all this is true, that beauty is birthed from the hard places, then I suppose I have to believe that in this “hard-for-me” thing of you aging and starting to walk and being all not-baby-like, that the beauty is hiding somewhere in there too, eventually to be revealed. 

And so in between watching your birth video 67 times today, and looking at every single picture we’ve ever taken of you and sniffling and eye-dripping and squeezing you extra tight, I’m also going to blow up some balloons and bake a cake and watch you gleefully delight in the wrapping paper around your presents, because that too is beautiful and an anticipation of the good things to come. 

It’s ok girl, not that I could hold you back anyway, but go ahead, party it up. Get all big and sprout that hair and babble those words and I promise to try real hard to cheer you on and not knock you down when you take your first steps. Because as much as I want you to be my baby forever, I love you enough to want you to be you; to become the image of what God dreamed you up to be, which I can already confirm, is just perfect. 

Happy birthday little one. 

Love, 

Your mom