Hart Musings - Rebecca

It’s been years, and feels like more. Our world is completely changed. Hart. A year of so many miseries ends in a triumph—no, that’s too competitive a word…glory, joy, love. I’m grateful for this time with him alone in the hospital. And, oddly, I’m grateful that he is so weak and vulnerable. My sympathies are quickened by his small size, feeble cries, and involuntary tremerous chin or arm. I have fallen quickly and deeply in love. Thank you, thank you, thank you Kevin for convincing me to do this. It was a miserable pregnancy and up until my look at him in the NICU (after only a quick peek at the birth) I was saying I would not have done it had I known. Those fierce and real feelings are dissipating. What we will go through for such love! I have withstood so much this year it all seemed unending. And, now, it seems ended. This, this beauty, has changed my world, and as the new year arrives so arrives our new world. I am released—and it is not just, as I first thought, a release from or out of the grueling pregnancy, but a release into something overwhelmingly glorious. Kevin had put high expectations on a second child and not only what it would do for our family, but also what it would do for him and even his work. I can’t predict but I can, at least, imagine this coming true for him and for me, too. A baby is work, but love is liberation, perhaps a more formidable force. I thrill to the fact that he looks so much like Sevi, at least for now. Somehow that makes our bond as a family seem so much stronger. I am lucky. We are lucky. And, in time, others in the world will realize their good fortune to have this being. He starts out—right away—bringing a lightness to my being that has been absent for so long that I thrill to its warmth and thrive in its promise. I hope, he, in turn, will thrive in our love and care—Sevi’s, Papa’s, and mine.