The Life I Planned, The One I Have

I had the opportunity to publish an essay at literarymama.com, an online journal that features writing about motherhood. To read the full essay, click on the link at the bottom of the introduction.

A photograph circulated our house for years, moving from room to room wherever my daughters played. Most often it could be found greeting guests at the front door, held up by dimpled hands, presented as a small offering. “Look,” one girl would announce with pride. “This is the first time we met our brother.”

Smudged with miniature fingerprints, the image reveals two sisters, babies themselves really, holding a newborn boy. The four-year-old sits in a rocking chair and stretches baby brother across her lap—his feet tucked in close to her belly, his bottom resting on her legs, his head gently cupped in her outstretched hand. They are eye-to-eye. The almost two-year-old stands next to her big sister and rests a single hand atop her brother’s head, studying his face with uncertain awe—golden skin, brushstroke eyes, a shock of pale hair peeking from beneath a hand-knit cap. The baby, small and limp, seems unaffected by their presence. Perhaps he is too tired to wake himself, new as he is in the great wide world. Perhaps he recognizes their voices, so clear now, unlike the same time the day before when he heard them through layers of his mother’s womb. In any case, he is a picture of peace. 

Somewhere outside the frame stand a mother and father and, just beyond, the mother’s parents. The picture, blurry, is not so different from the mother’s vision at that time. Behind her weak smile, she secretly longs for a time before now—a time when welcoming her third child felt less complicated. 

Our lucky number three entered our world like a tiny gust of wind one January morning—a boy whose first name means courage, whose middle name means gift.

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