Tomorrow is Children’s Day. And I can’t think of a better day to tell you about my favourite child.
Sometimes I think we moved to America just to have him.
After an ectopic pregnancy and four miscarriages, we’d stopped trying. We had quietly accepted that perhaps parenthood wasn’t meant for us.
Then, a week before we were due to move to the United States for my husband’s new job, I bent down to lift a suitcase and felt a sharp pain.
I wasn’t ill.
I was pregnant.
This was the first time we saw and heard the sound of the most perfect heartbeat on the ultrasound.
That one unexpected moment changed everything.
I stayed behind on bed rest while my husband moved ahead. Four months later, I joined him.
The rest of my pregnancy was beautifully uneventful. In fact it was an easy pregnancy. We were living in California and spent the few months awaiting our son’s birth making short road trips, going to parks, the movies and checking out new restaurants.
When my son was born, things took a frightening turn. My uterus inverted and I almost bled to death.
Here’s the odd thing about becoming a mother. I’d been a daughter for thirty five years, a wife for more than ten, and a mother for just six and a half minutes. And yet, before I passed out amidst all the chaos, hearing the code Blue announced, knowing it was for me and watching the doctors and nurses scrambling around me, my only thought was: I wanted to live so I could be with my child.
And I got to do that.
By some extraordinary twist of fate, three doctors, (a lung specialist, a blood vessel expert and a cardiologist) who weren’t even meant to be at the hospital that night had been called in for an emergency burn patient.
Instead…
they ended up saving me.
Looking back now, it still amazes me. My gynaecologist was equally stunned. In her 20-odd years of practice, I was her first case of uterine inversion. She wondered how so many things had lined up to save me. Had I registered at a smaller hospital or nursing home, they simply wouldn’t have had the ability to keep me from dying. I had registered at Torrance Memorial simply because it was closest to our home. The fact that all three doctors were literally at the door at that hour was almost surreal. My doctor admitted that she couldn’t have done it without all three of them being present.
From the day I conceived him until the day he was born, life seemed to place the right people in exactly the right place at exactly the right time.
And then just as fate had taken us there it brought us back to India within two years.
That’s why I’ve always called him my miracle child.
The years that followed were everything one gets when they have the naughty child they always wanted.
There were scraped knees, stitches, fractures, school projects, bad jokes, growing pains and endless conversations.
There was laughter.
So much laughter.
Then life did what it sometimes does.
My cancer came back.
My son was living in New York by then, building a life of his own.
One phone call later, he was on a plane home.
He stayed with me for five weeks.
He sat through my surgery, chemotherapy appointments and the long, ordinary hours in between.
He played cards.
He organised board games.
He made me laugh.
He quietly helped make a frightening time feel less frightening.
He never once made me feel that I was facing it alone.
People often ask me whether I believe in miracles.
I do.
Sometimes miracles are dramatic.
Sometimes they’re tiny.
And sometimes…
they grow up, get a job, move halfway across the world…
and come straight home when their mother needs them.
My darling,
you arrived when we’d stopped hoping.
You came home when I needed you most.
You’ve filled my life with laughter from the day you were born.
You will always be my miracle.
I love you.
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