“It’s a girl!” the doctor announced at 1:48AM after over twenty hours of grueling labor. Or maybe it was the nurse who told me I had a daughter? My body was shaking, going into shock and I couldn’t breath on my own. How could someone that moments before, was experiencing such pain be so numb to reality?
The minutes passed by as my baby was getting cleaned up, weighed and swaddled. I remember I was freezing cold, still on oxygen and my jaw was out of line.
My mom was the first to hold her. I was in such a state of “something” that I felt like I was having an out of body experience. I remember my mom telling her new granddaughter they were going to go shopping. She’s made good on that promise, by the way, countless times over.
Then, an 8 pound, ten ounce, twenty-one and a half inch long angel baby with a sprinkling of light brown hair and deep blue eyes was placed in my arms.
I looked at her, and it was still surreal. I was a mom. Wow.
I remember resting in my hospital room and hearing a baby’s cry from down the hall. It was my baby Grace; I knew it. I hadn’t known her for a full day, yet I knew her cry.
There’s so much to our story. How I was 21 and unmarried when I got pregnant with her. How I was married and a mother at age 22. How I was 23 and divorced. How my parents were my rock through it all. How I met and later married the man God created for me. And how if it weren’t for my Grace I wouldn’t have found His grace. There are so many things between then and now, but those stories are for another day. Today, I celebrate her.
“What’s her name?” the nurse asked, as she recorded her birth.
“Grace” I answered. “Her name is Grace Elizabeth”.
She is all I ever could have asked for in a daughter….and more.
Wishing my beautiful daughter Grace a very happy fifteenth birthday today. I love you to the moon and back, infinity.
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