To Matthew on Gotcha Day

That moment when I birthed you from my heart was not like when I birthed your sister and your brother.

With those first two, the pain ripped through my body, threatening to tear me apart with each push. Their bodies emerged from my own—wet, new, and covered in water and blood.

Their first cries pierced the quiet birthing rooms, announcing their presence, their place in the world. I cried tears of joy and relief, and I reached gently and pulled those new, limber bodies to my chest, my breast, my worry overcome with mama instinct as I snuggled those babies close to my heart.

Your birth was different. The room was loud with the cries of other babies, each one caught  by a mom or a dad who had waited months to welcome them with anxious hearts and joy mixed with fear.

I was overwhelmed with emotion waiting there, desperate for just a glimpse of your face, the face I had stared at for hours in the months we waited—singing to you, talking to you, praying for you.

When they put you in my arms, you felt small and helpless as you pressed your body into me, fearful and unsure. You looked up into my face and held my gaze, and as I cried tears of joy, you must have felt a kind of terror I’ve never known. It was a transfer—a passing—from one life to the next, and I will never know what you left behind in that moment.

I gained you, dear boy, and you lost a country and a culture—when so many months before that you had lost even more: your family and the potential for life in the place that was your first home.

In my arms you felt strange—smelled strange—but I clung to you just as you did me, and when I put you in your daddy’s arms, he began to rock you and sing to you, just as he did with our first two babies. It was that moment—watching the two of you together—that broke the spell of my worry and grounded me—watching Daddy sway back and forth with you, his quiet tenor voice humming the same hymn he sang to our first two babies for so many months.

When he handed you back to me again and I snuggled you close, I made the same promise to you that I made to your brother and sister—to be your mama forever, to take care of you always.

You came to me a different way, birthed in my heart, but that moment of your “gotcha” haunts me in the same way I’m haunted by my laboring to birth your sister and brother. It was a passage for them from the womb-world of warmth and quiet to the bright, cold reality of lights and harsh noises and always needing something more.

But your birth from womb to world had already occurred, and that moment signified something more than separation from your mama’s body to her arms. Somewhere along the way, you were also pulled (or handed) from that mama’s arms to a new strange place, where you learned to calm your own cries and to stop asking for what you needed. You didn't know there was more to need by the time I met you.

When you arrived in my arms, you didn’t know warmth or softness or the lull of a mama’s voice. You had to learn those things, and I will always be haunted by all that you were asked to give up in the first few days of your life.

And that day, when I finally “gotcha,” you once again gave up what was familiar to you and held me tight with your body, and you birthed yourself into my arms and my heart and my life. And your dad's too.

I am so grateful, my brave boy, that you made that choice. That you chose to trust me and your dad, that you decided to embrace this new life we are helping to make for you.

And today, though I am across the country from you in body, you are near to my heart and my mind. 
I will not forget the first moment I held you.

And I will also never forget what it cost you to be a willing participant in your birthing into this new life.