I was younger that morning than my youngest granddaughter is right now and I desperately wished for only one thing, just three words…I wished for these words over and over and over, and at 5:04 in the morning I heard them, It’s a girl.

That girl is a beloved elementary school teacher now, a woman who has had two weddings and two heartbreaks and two daughters, and those two daughters now are already women themselves…that four decades can go by THAT fast, and I still remember the most specific details of the morning that I became a mother, and my daughter was welcomed to earth, still blows my mind…I am sure we all have memories of important events or scary hours or happy festivities, and that January morning was all of those things and I remember nearly every second of it.

I don’t know many people for whom life is always easy or the ride is always smooth. My life was very hard for a very long time, and then it wasn’t really hard at all. My life was very sad, and then it wasn’t, and then it was again…the ups and the downs, it’s only natural I suppose…the times when your cupboards are stocked and the times when you could not give your poor dog a bone…I feel so young some days and yet can’t believe that I have lived through so much. Some people get through to this age, my age, relatively unscathed and unharmed, but I am not one of those people. My memories of my daughter’s infancy are filled with terror and worry, and to tell you how grateful I am that we are where we are now, is an understatement. That we got to be adults who get along most often more like girlfriends, that we got to live in two beautiful homes on acres of land right next door to each other, I mean seriously, I could never have imagined back then, in the beginning, that life could be so good!!!

I have said for years that one of the things that makes me very sad in life, and always has, is how little I feel I have in common with my parents who, for the most part, do not think as I do about ANYTHING, BUT…BUT…BUT…there they were, and have always been…loving wide open arms and open loving hearts, and always an unlocked door for me to enter, or a strong supportive shoulder to lean on, to rescue me from every bad decision I have ever made…they helped me out of a terrible life when I was still just a teenager, and helped me to create a better future for myself and my daughter than I could have ever wished for. My daughter and I basically grew up at the same time and my parents were, for all intents and purposes, her parents too, and I am forever thankful for them. Even though we have often butted heads and even though we are so often on opposite sides of most issues, just three words saved my life again and again and again…we love you.

I come from a family filled with love. I have believed, and even if it wasn’t true, felt that too many times over my adult life I have deeply disappointed my parents (and my mother will say and swear that they were never disappointed in me, but I still think she just says that to be nice) but I have never felt, not even one day, not even one hour, unloved by my parents. I know, now that I am nearing 60 and have known many people who did not get the good fortune to get born to good parents, that I am lucky. That my daughter got to be loved, with the exact same devotion and without condition, by my parents, is a gift that they gave both of us. The morning she was born, a bitter cold Thursday, I had absolutely no idea how on earth I was going to get through the next week, or year, or ever have a good life…but forty years later, three little words from the first weekend she arrived on earth actually made all the difference in the world…it’s a girl, and we love you.