Again

It’s a pretty common saying but truly, what a difference a year makes.  It was exactly one year ago today, I was pacing the floors of the very hospital I happen to be born in, waiting for my daughter to give birth.  It was a frankly nerve wracking experience; fraught with tension and joy and anticipation and such newness and depth of emotion that it took my breath away. 

My granddaughter came a year ago today and when I first spied her, all the way down the hall so fresh from her mother’s womb, I felt the earth literally swell up in front of me as if I were on a violently rocking ship, in the middle of the ocean.  I remember my chest heaved, my very reality shifted.  I thought my knees would buckle because everything else certainly did.

Just like when my own daughter was born.

Later, friends and family were to tell me that all I said softly was, ‘Again’.  My BFF would eventually ask me what I had meant.

What I suppose I meant, because I don’t recall saying anything at all, was that I was to once again feel my entire world change just as it had when my beloved Brittany came into the world.  I had once again fallen in love, absolutely and utterly, with a fierceness and complete fearlessness, just the way I had when I first become a mother myself.  And only for the second time in my life.

I know this, I call thinking later as I gazed down at my daughter nuzzling her newborn when they were both reunited in daughter’s hospital room.  It felt the very same way as when my own child was born but even more so because I now knew what is out there in the world.  I knew all too well how fiercely mothers will try and protect their children from the bad that can happen.

And as much as I do not remember saying ‘Again’ aloud the way everyone says I did, I do recall the very second I got to first hold Claudia.

“Hello Baby,” I whispered as I touched her impossibly tiny hand.  “I’m your Nana and I fought very hard to be here today.”

So, Baby Claudia’s first birthday is more than just your average infant’s celebration.  It is also the anniversary of my daughter becoming a mother and me becoming a Nana.

It is also the very first day after my battle fighting cancer that I knew that I had achieved something beyond splendid. 

I was still here. And I got to hold, for only the second time in my life, a brand new, perfect little miracle.