TWO

As long as I live, I think I'll never tire of remembering how either of my children arrived.  They were both beautiful experiences, both long and painful, both required medication (I seriously required anti-anxiety medicine to get my butt across that ocean in the flying cabinet of death...lol), and both resulted in precious and sacred love of a lifetime.  I look at the pictures, and the emotion of these moments comes flooding back.  I can feel sun shining warm through cooler than expected air, smell the tin walls, dust and diesel fumes, feel the soles of my feet grasping for balance and speed on the large rocky terrain.  I can feel the warmth of her and remember thinking, "She's warm.  She's real!" 

We awoke our first morning together and sat on the edges of our beds looking at the other like, "now what?"  It was a surreal moment to be staring at a perfect stranger and also be the mother of that perfect stranger. 

We did what was the only thing we could do.

We took the first step. 

I brought her over to my bed and sat her in my lap.  I pretended I knew what I was doing, and I laid her head against my chest and rocked her back and forth like I did with Brenin every morning.  I was praying that she'd like it and that some day soon it would be MY smell and my touch that would bring her comfort, just as it did for Brenin and as my mother's did for me. 

I have a feeling she pretended to like it and had she known how would have been saying some prayers of her own that crisp Ethiopian morning.  We were both existing in complete faith and grace... faith that it would all feel natural one day and that we wouldn't cause or feel pain from this strange person who we were now bound to for all time, grace from Heaven above as we stood and tried and fell and rose again in all our fear and faults, and grace from each other, taking these first few wobbly steps with our face pressed against our chest, listening to the other's heartbeats for the very first time. 

We were born in that moment. 

On nearly all my "roads to Damascus," I've had a fearless and wise travel companion, my Dad (here walking on the road we "lived on" in Ethiopia).  Any sort of medicated pseudo-adventurousness (ha!) in me has come from him, and the courage and passion he and my mom instilled in me is what brought me across that ocean and down that gravel road to our "home sweet home"...if it looks a world away, that's because it is. 

In my arms for 2 years, in God's plan for far longer.