I can’t look at anything in our home without thinking of you. I think of your growing vocabulary, and all the names you have for items in our house. I think of your little crooked head while you watch movies. I think of the way you let me hold your hand, and how you’ll run anytime someone uses the words “ready, set….”
Right now I am in the back room looking at a paper with your little scribbles all over it. Mostly circles, but intended to be dinosaurs, Nemo, a family portrait, a cow.
I have to write this down while I am feeling it. I have to tell you that my heart feels like it could burst. I want to die from love. It doesn’t make any sense, but it will if you ever find yourself in the position of caring for your actual heart that lives outside your body.
I almost lost you... and then you lost me for a while. It’s our secret, this unexpected gift we received in quarantine. We got us back. “Mama and Lucia” is how you put it on our alone walks. It’s the most impossible precious gift.
Last year, when we got a little lost, it was this exact amount of time I disappeared into this very room. In the fetal position for 75 days or was it 12,000. I can’t remember. I stepped out of my body, my heart, my mind and into a world I never want you to discover. It’s full of snakes, plagues, lies, and shadows chasing you.
As I sit here I can’t help but think that a year later, it took the same amount of days to mend me as it did to break me. Your laughter, constant all the while.
You, my sweet girl. You are an absolute joy. In my stretches of doubt (and there are many), you are a very real picture of the beauty, love, and light of God. A burden that is weightless. A joy that is infectious. You lure my cynicism out and tame it with love. You’re everything forgiveness, everything redemption, everything good, everything I never deserved.
Mothers Day matters because of you. Because I have lived most of my life rejecting love out of fear, but your tiny eyelashes and the way you say “ok sure, yeah!’ at every suggestion… it awakens my soul and ears and eyes to God.
I love you so deeply, my heart. To be your mama is my greatest honor.
I will never forget this season, ever.
We are Mama and Lucia.
