To my grade one doppelganger (except, you’re not, because we are biologically related).
From day one of your life, I felt as though I was simply your carrier, the one who bore and delivered you into this life. For, from my first glance of your squirmy body, you looked like your daddy. Your copper-colored hair, your squinty bright blue eyes, your face shape, your skin tone … all of it. And I loved every bit, for a mother does not love a child for what she knows, but simply because the child is hers.
Then, when you were not ever two, we moved and the receptionist and nurse and our new doctor’s office were in awe at how much we looked alike. Though I doubted what they said, it did warm my momma heart that we might share something more than just DNA.
A few years later, I picked up photos from the drug store (because that was the way it was done back in the stone ages). As I flipped through the images of our growing kids I was immediately halted when I came to the photo of you at a birthday (above). The same squinty eyes, the same smile, and face shape, and eyebrows, and even the hint of similar freckles was looking back at me … not at the 30-something momma of three, but the grade one me. Heck, you even tilted your head like me … just in the opposite direction.
I don’t know why exactly seeing that we were similar was so comforting to me. Maybe there is something primal about it …
maybe I simply longed to see,
not me in you,
but you in me?
The perfect unity of I am in you and you are in me. Oneness, perhaps, was my heart’s desire.
Today is your birthday. A quarter century of the gift of life. A gift that comes with little foretaste of what will come your way … the tough decisions to be made, the struggles (with relationships, with health, etc.). Sometimes it can feel that it is too hard … but, hard is accompanied by other things … the better things (relationships, art, beauty in nature, successes at work, good food … cats) and these things are the things that bring a twinkle to our eyes … our squinty eyes.
I wish you a new year of things that make you smile, sunshine that brings out your freckles, squinty-eyed smiles and oneness.
I love you, my baby girl. I am so glad that you are mine … and I am yours.
itsawonderfilledlife 