Three years ago you were born even as I fought against nature and attempted to hold you in. This is not how the baby books tell you to approach labor. Quite the opposite, actually. Apparently I was supposed to work with the contraction, breathing out and letting it deliver you into this world.
Instead I gripped bed rails and held every breath attempting to stop you from slipping away from me, in both body and spirit.
They took you anyway, through an incision, so all that effort to fight my own body was for naught.
And at twenty five weeks gestation you had a birthday, fifteen weeks before your due date, now residing on the same calendar page as Thanksgiving rather than Valentine’s Day.
They pushed my bed toward a recovery room down a hospital hallway adorned with festive fall decor, in the exact opposite direction they were wheeling you.
On our first Thanksgiving together I stared down at your face, cupped in my palm, the size of your skull so small that it failed to fill it. A nurse cleared away the tubes from your nose and your mouth and removed the tiny little shades covering your eyes so that I could see you properly, the flesh of my flesh.
When I was a little girl I traced my hand with marker and meticulously colored in each outline of a finger to form a turkey. Scrawled in shaky cursive on each feather was a thanksgiving for family, for food, for my cat Bosco who curled up on my feet at night and for winning the Pilgrim Hat Making Contest.
(I was a very competitive child.)
We went around the table and passed words of thanksgiving with the gravy, for family, for food, for fellowship and for football.
(Depending on which team was winning.)
Many thanksgivings have left my lips but none so full of truth than the day that I whispered it over you softly, so as not to overburden your yet unformed ears with the sound.
Then they draped a blanket back over your isolette and I couldn’t see you, but I could see your heartbeats on a monitor and I counted every one in thanksgiving to its unsteady rhythm.
Another heartbeat. Thank you, Lord.
Another heartbeat. Thank you, Lord.
She forgot to breathe. Let her breathe, let her breathe.
Breathe.
Please breathe.
She took a breath. Thank you, Lord.
Elsewhere other families broke bread and bowed heads while I sat in the dark and uncovered a thanksgiving that I didn’t know could exist in such suffering, one that entangled itself with my existence and would become a light unto my path.
I don’t need a calendar for Thanksgiving now, all orange and brown, marked by apple cider and falling leaves.
You rolled over and it was Thanksgiving, hot summer sun beating down on the window.
You spoke a single syllable and it was Thanksgiving, snow falling softly from the night sky.
You took shaky steps toward us and it was Thanksgiving, blooms still in buds outside.
I know that our story could have ended differently and I’m still counting the Thanksgivings with heartbeats, a new rhythm of life where all of the smallest things really do call for rejoicing.
“Thanksgiving always precedes the miracle.” – Ann Voskamp
And at night, when I tuck you in with your tulip blanket and feel your chest rise and fall with breath and pulse of a heartbeat underneath my hand, I can see it in the flesh.
Thank you, Lord.
“In everything give thanks.” – 1 Thessalonians 5:18