I didn’t bother with anything but the digital test. At only nineteen years old and completely unprepared, I needed to be sure. Yet, I was still in disbelief when the screen read, clear as day, PREGNANT. I spent the next nine months trying to prepare myself. There were a lot of ups and downs during my pregnancy, including splitting up with your dad. I thought I knew what love was then. In the only version of love I knew, I didn’t exist outside of it as a person of my own. This was no one's fault but mine but half way through my pregnancy with you a thought crept in and gripped my heart with iron fists.
How can I love and raise this baby when I don’t know who I am or what love is.
By the time this rumination took hold I would become your mother in four short months whether I was ready or not. I worried I had failed you before you ever took your first breath.
I won’t say every single doubt, worry, or apprehension disappeared the day you were born, because that would be a lie. However, the day you entered the world, Brady Daniel, is the day I did too. I found my voice because you needed me to be yours. One look into your already deep brown eyes, and I knew nothing mattered more than you. I knew to raise you to be a confident man who knew your place in the world I would have to find my own as well.
My whole world shifted our first night in the hospital. You were born close to seven thirty in the evening and by nine all the guests that waited for your arrival were back home. I wouldn’t dare let you spend the night in the hospital nursery even though after spending fourteen exhausting hours in labor I could barely make it from the hospital bed to the bathroom by myself. At nineteen, and reminded more times than I could count how young I was, I believed I had something to prove. Around one in the morning, I slowly limped my way from the bed to the bathroom, careful not to wake you sleeping soundly in the plastic bassinet tucked close to my hospital bed. Just moments after I made it inside the bathroom I heard you start to cry, moving as fast as I could I continued with the eight step process that’s involved in just using the bathroom after giving birth. The faster I moved the weaker I became. I quite literally crawled out of the bathroom and pulled myself back onto the bed and used the last of my strength to lift you into my arms. I laughed with friends later telling them how I had to crawl out of the bathroom, but it was there in that dark hospital room with you in my arms that I realized I would do anything for you.
I have not always gotten it right. I can’t say there aren’t things I wish I would have done differently. I won’t bore you with the list, because I’m sure it is much longer than each of us care to see right now. But kid, it wasn’t just me who raised you, you raised me too.
Today you are sixteen and I am undone. I’ve been trying to write this birthday note to you for months, and every single time I opened it my mind quickly started spinning, panicking that the time went by entirely too fast. Instead of trying to ignore the dread that my first baby is closer to being an adult than a child, I’d just succumb to it and close my laptop.
Soon you will be a licensed driver, taking you further and further from the safety of my arms. I will do my best to hide my tears the first time you pull your own truck out of our driveway without me in the passenger seat, just as I did as I hugged you goodbye on your first day of Kindergarten. I will re-remind myself that this is all part of raising children.
In case I don’t say this enough (pretty sure I don’t), I’m proud to be your mom and I love you for the person God created you to be. I would not change a single moment of the last sixteen years with you for anything. It is because of you I know what love is.
Happy sixteenth birthday Brady. I’m so unbelievably grateful God gave me YOU.
And because it’s me, I absolutely have to include some photos of Brady and I. So enjoy his cute baby goodness and forgive me for the most recent photo of the two of us being a year ago. The best I get (when I don’t force him to do family photos) is a snap chat selfie, and you won’t see those here. haha.
Beautiful. ❤️ And, this is me too!!! “However, the day you entered the world, Brady Daniel, is the day I did too. I found my voice because you needed me to be yours. One look into your already deep brown eyes, and I knew nothing mattered more than you. I knew to raise you to be a confident man who knew your place in the world I would have to find my own as well.” I had my first a month shy of 21, and this is absolutely how I feel about it. Happy Birthday to Brady! And Happy Birth of a Mother Day to you!
😭😍😍😍 I’m not crying, you’re crying. This is the sweetest post. Happy birthday to your boy!!