Last year, A turned 16. Yes, you read that right. 16. Our first baby is now 16. I am proud of myself for managing not to cry about this milestone!
A little over 16 years ago, I was in a hospital room on the preterm labor unit. My husband had gone fishing with my Dad a few hours away...after all, I had been in the hospital for a few weeks and nothing was really going on...we didn't think anything would happen for a few weeks yet, and poor Mark had spent every night sleeping in my hospital room. And so we sent him off on a fishing trip with my Dad. How could we have known that things were about to change and our baby would be arriving much sooner than planned???
Fortunately, she was not born while he was gone. He made it back with plenty of time to spare. And then, in the early morning on a cool Anchorage morning in late August, our sweet A made her way into the world. Her arrival was not without drama, of course. (We should have known that was a harbinger of things to come...our beautiful, sweet drama girl!) She wasn't crying when she was born...she was bruised from head to toe and having difficulty breathing. Our bishop at the time happened to also be the head of the neonatal unit at the hospital and was on call at the time of her birth and a woman in our ward was her assigned nurse for the first day of her life and kept a close, close eye on her. They were two of several angels who watched over our sweet baby in those first difficult few hours and days. It was a traumatic event for all of us. The first time I held her she was hooked up to IVs and an oxygen mask and a feeding tube. She was so small (well, not compared some of the tiny preemies in the NICU) and I felt so helpless and scared as I held her. But somehow, I knew we would manage. The hardest part came a day or so later when we had our precious baby at the hospital when I was discharged and she wasn't able to come home yet. Never before had I had to do something so difficult (at that's saying something since I did natural childbirth, LOL).
She was a beautiful baby, even bruised and jaundiced and tiny. And she was all ours. She was and continues to be our "guinea pig"...she has suffered more than her fair share "first time parent-itis" mistakes on our part. Like the time her Daddy accidentally dumped her out of her car seat onto the floor...or the time I left the videocamera case out on the floor and she flipped over the top of it (I can't watch the video of that moment because it still scares me!)... She quickly became the center of our lives and before she was ever born she had completely captured my heart.
And last week, 16 years and 2 days after she entered this world in all her dramatic glory, I waited again as a bundle of nerves with baited breath. I wasn't waiting to hear her first cry this time, the cry that took so very long to come. This time, I was waiting for a message from her letting me know that she had made it safely to the school on her first solo drive. Just as it went against bit of my maternal instincts to leave her at the hospital as a tiny, fragile newborn, it went against every bit of my maternal instincts to let her get in the car by herself and drive away from me...alone. Don't get me wrong -- she is an excellent driver. But I can't say the same about the thousands of other people on the road! We have new rules in place...things like requiring her to send me a text message when she arrives at seminary safely, when she gets ready to leave cross country practice to drive home, when gets anywhere safely and is ready to come home.
We are long past the days when we had to carefully scrub up in the NICU washing area before entering to make sure she was protected from outside germs...and yet, as we send her out in to the world on her own, I wonder if we have done enough to protect her...enough to prepare her to protect herself from the influences and dangers of the world.
She is an intelligent, talented, beautiful, strong young woman who doesn't see how amazing, lovely, and incredible she really is. I wish she could see what we see in her...what most people see in her. But more than that, I find myself wishing that I could keep her enclosed in a little isolette and protect her from all of the dangers of the world...dangers that I fear she steps closer and closer to facing on her own every day. Have we done enough to protect her? I can only hope and pray that we have, and then try harder each day to build her up before she goes back out to face another day.
I am eternally grateful for this sweet young lady who first made me a Mother. I know I've made many mistakes along the path of motherhood, and there are many mistakes left to make. I feel bad that she gets to be on the receiving end of those mistakes. But most of all, I'm just grateful that SHE is the person I get to make those mistakes on. That she is mine, forever.
I love you, A. Don't be in too much of a hurry to grow up and leave me.
