I initially wrote this in February of 2020. At the time we hadn’t announced our baby’s gender, so I waited to post it. In the ensuing chaos, it never made it online. Now as our little one moves into her second year of life, it seems an appropriate celebration of her sweet and adventurous spirit. When I wrote this, I had no idea what was about to descend on our world. I had no idea the grief that awaited us. But this sweet life entrusted to us has continued to be a promise in difficulty, not only for my family, but for everyone who meets her. Everywhere she goes she brings smiles and lights up the room. She continues to be our perfect gift.
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Dear one,
I haven’t had the pleasure of meeting you yet. As I write this you are nestled safely inside of me, distracting me with your little wiggles while I try to cram in what Azerbaijani lessons I can before life changes pace again. I don’t know much about you yet, but I know one thing: you have always been perfect.
If all goes well, you will be here in a few months. We will watch you grow from petulant toddler to beautiful young woman, with many adventures and joys and struggles along the way. You will learn courage and self-doubt and all of the other lessons our lives lead us through, and through it all I will remind you of this. That before you were even born, you were exactly who the world needed you to be. You were exactly what God intended.
I have to confess something to you: when I learned I was pregnant with you, my heart was heavy. I was excited, so excited that I woke your dad up at 6am to tell him (so you know that’s pretty extreme) but joy felt out of reach. I had been walking through a season of deep darkness, and those shadows seemed to tinge even this, an event I wanted to celebrate with everything I was.
We started talking about names, and found a few that we liked. We settled on our name for a girl, one we liked for a variety of reasons, and I thought maybe I should look up what it meant, just to make sure we wouldn’t be labeling our child with some terrible moniker for them to bear for the rest of their lives.
As soon as I saw what it meant, I knew you were a girl, and that this was your name. “Free from sorrow.” In the midst of my darkness God whispered a promise to me, and it was you. When I was too lost in mourning to see dawn coming, God gave me new life, literally, in the gift of you.
When we went to the ultrasound appointment and the technician confirmed what I knew, tears rolled down my face to the table. “I dreamed it was a girl,” I told her, unable to fold the enormity of your existence into a brief conversation with a stranger. “Your dream was true,” she replied.
I don’t know who you will grow up to be. I have hopes for you, as all parents do, and they mostly have to do with you being happy and healthy and loving Jesus. I know they might not come true, and while I don’t want to imagine it parenthood means accepting the reality that you might face illness or disability. You might spend years as a prodigal or be pursued by the same anxiety and insecurity that so often plague your mother. The time we are given with you may be too short, or it may stretch on for decades before we have to say goodbye.
But no matter what happens, remember this: you have always been perfect. Not because of anything you earned, or because of your hard work, but when you were nothing but cells in my womb the gift of grace made you perfect. You were exactly the promise my wounded heart needed.
To be free from sorrow does not mean we will never mourn with you or for you. You will live on a broken earth with the rest of us, and so sorrow will come. Your name is a promise of something else – that one day, we will all truly be free of sorrow. It will pass away, and death will die, and we will celebrate for eternity. Until then, we are granted glimpses of it, sparks of joy in simple moments, like hearing a stranger say, “It’s a girl.”
You will always be a promise to me that God sees me in the darkness and the light, and that the darkness never gets the final word. Oh, my love, thank you for being a gift to me from the very beginning. I love you.