Welcome to Earth

In honor of my son's birthday, since this has filled my heart and mind since I read it, and nothing else could come close to being such a beautiful tribute, I present my only sister and her gorgeous words:

I remember when I learned about love.
It’s hard to think back to that one moment in time when your mind draws an association between an abstract concept and a concrete word. To remember when you thought to yourself “I am sad” or “this is what happy is.” I may not recall exactly when I learned what love was supposed to be and how to recognize its trappings, but I do remember when I learned about what love really was when it came from me in its purest form.

And it all started 8 years ago….
It seems impossible to come to this date without at some point in the day recounting the event of Evan’s birth. It was a wild tale that started 2 months before it was supposed to and ended with me babbling on the phone “Jesi’s…given birth!” to might-as-well-be-family who had the good grace not to laugh at me and/or have me committed (had I not been 17 at the time, I think that would’ve been the point at which someone would have handed me a stiff drink). There was a helicopter ride (not involving me), a car ride that almost ended in catastrophe (involving me), a father getting trapped in an elevator, two girls in prom dresses (who did not end up going to their prom), and a hotel that caught on fire. It was, needless to say, an eventful two days.

I will not pretend that the months leading up to it were easy for they were anything but. Everyone in the family was readjusting his or her course in life and it frequently resulted in flaring tempers and too many tears. We were changing as a family, in a state of metamorphosis, and in the process I think we all got a little bit lost in ourselves. I was not exempt and I fell inside myself out of pure selfishness.

However my selfish teenage world vanished the day my sister went into labor. My world became a hospital room. A sea of anxious faces. A person on the cusp of being. And a family. I was so fearful for my family that I simply didn’t have the space inside me to think about myself. And in those endless days I found that my love for my family was distilled to its purest form in the presence of fear. Love for my brother who I thought was too young to endure this. Love for my parents and their bravery as they had to let other doctors, strangers, take care of their baby girl. Love for my sister, whose pain and struggle was reflected in the faces of all my family members. And love for the tiny womb-held baby for whom I feared the most.
The story, as you know, has a happy ending. Evan arrived to us in time and grew to be a healthy, compassionate child with a distinctly un-childlike mixture of gravity and levity in him and a social insight far beyond his years. But in those days, eight years ago, while we waited on tenterhooks for news, good or bad, we did not know him yet. And yet, we knew that we feared for him and in that fear we grasped the strands of unadulterated love.

I am surprised no one was blown away by the collective sigh that was released when Evan was finally born in the wee morning hours of April 27th. The long wait had passed and Evan was finally with us. Of course, since he was so premature, he had to remain at the hospital but we felt that we had weathered the storm and the rest would be just some tricky sailing. While he was still in hospital, as a little “blue light special,” monitored by doctors and nurses and a revolving shift of watchful friends and family, my cousin Zach gave him a handmade card with a picture of the world and the words “Welcome to Earth.”

Every birthday is a reminder of that welcoming. Of how our anxious family tentatively welcomed him into the world, and how Evan – in a sense – likewise welcomed us back to Earth, back to ourselves. To a family that was irrevocably altered but stronger, tempered with the love that sometimes only fear can bring out.
That tiny, premature baby, born into love, has given back that love a million times over. His presence is a joy and his utter selflessness is a constant reminder to me of what true love is. I know there will be times when he’s older when he may say or do hurtful things, when he may grow weary of the constant stream of affection and attention the family throws at him, but I know that it will only be temporary. I know that it will come from a place of rebellion not from pure nastiness because he has nothing nasty inside. And I wonder if all the people who do, who carry ugliness inside them, I wonder if they do so because they were never properly welcomed to Earth.