Ordinary, Every Day Miracle

Dear Taryn,

Today was the day, you know. It finally happened, and I can't believe it's here.

The few shaky steps you've been taking turned into an all out chase around the living room, with you moving confidently, if still wobbly, about on your sturdy little legs as fast as you could go, and your mommy torn between laughter and tears. 

I don't know how to express to you or to anyone else, really, the overwhelming joy seeing you walk brings me. It wasn't too hard for you. Oh, you do it on your toes, and that makes me pause for a minute, but you do it. There were no casts, no endless physical therapy appointments, no x-rays, no frustrated tears as your legs failed again and again-there was just you, learning to do it on your own without the need for modern medical intervention. 

Did you know your feet were the first thing I looked at when you were born? I drove the ultrasound techs nuts while I was pregnant with you-"Feet still okay?" I was paranoid. I still have an irrational fear that I'll wake up one morning and your feet will look like your brother's. 

Your feet are perfect. Your legs are perfect. Everything is straight, strong, and in exactly the shape it should be in. 

That's a miracle.

It's an ordinary, every day miracle.

I don't know which one of you to thank for teaching me that the ordinary, every day child I thought I'd have with your brother is nothing short of a miracle-your brother, whose multiple medical issues taught me to find the beauty in the every day things and the struggle it took to get him to do them, or you, to whom all those things come just as they should, and who has shown me how beautiful the natural process of childhood is.  Perhaps both of you. Definitely both of you.

I call your brother my miracle boy, because he is. He had a lot of odds stacked against him, and he is still here, still fighting, still overcoming every obstacle biology has thrown at him.

You, my love, are my miracle boy, too. We don't know where a lot of your brother's problems came from, but many of them have possible genetic origins. One of them (his blood disorder) is 100% genetic. You have, so far, dodged all of them. You have the same mother, the same father, the same blood flowing through your veins-and yet, you dodged it all. You need glasses, and you walk on your toes, and you have a few sensory issues, but that...that's a clean bill of health, as far as I'm concerned. 

Today, I witnessed a miracle. And ten thousand other families witnessed the same miracle in their own children in their own homes.

How many of them realized it was a miracle?

Love,

Mommy