By: Jennifer Richardson Holt
This is a big day. I actually might go so far as to say this day is downright monumental and honestly I can think of several people who would likely agree and say that description is apt. I actually find myself at a loss for where to start in even approaching the subject at hand because of its sheer magnitude. Every angle I consider for today seems inadequate to capture the gravity. You see, five years ago on this very day my world changed. My husband’s world changed. My parents’ word changed. I don’t mean in a “just something new” sense of the word either when I say changed. I say that all at once this day reinvented who we are. It redefined all of us. It took our being and rewove it into a completely different design. We were still the same people but only in the most basic sense of the word. Our roles and how we conducted our entire lives had shifted. We began to orbit a completely new sun so to speak and our existences began to arrange themselves around this new heavenly being. Five years ago on this date, at 11:25 A.M. my daughter was born. So this was no small event that I am blowing out of proportion in my writing with an excess of descriptive terminology. Today marks her first half decade of a budding lifetime and my first half decade of having my heart living its own life outside my body. As I said, it is quite the day.
It began rather unassumingly that day. Yes, my stomach had been mildly aching on and off since the previous evening but overall the whole process had been nothing like one sees on television. When I called labor and delivery at the hospital even THEY didn’t think it was the real thing. I suppose that does lend some credence to the concept that this pending arrival wasn’t exactly typical. It was actually roughly seven hours or so after the strange goings on began that I actually did go to the hospital. Even then I was very suspicious of the whole process because this wasn’t the dramatic production that I was expecting. But what did I know? I was simply thankful that they didn’t send me back home once I got there. Upon settling in I was told that this would likely be a long process as first babies tend to be. Again, this meshed well with my images from most Hollywood portrayals that I had seen. Of course it would, there would have to be hours of me yelling and pushing while sweaty but surprisingly put together looking, right? That’s what it has to look like, right?
I suppose I should have considered that my daughter hadn’t been able to actually see the TV during all those shows. She also had apparently not paid attention to a single booklet or educational video. Labor with a first child I was taught would be a long drawn out process, often fraught with difficulty. No, my child had not gotten all these memos nor had she jotted a single note from all my childbirth classes. She came quickly and unremarkably. Everyone in the hospital kept asking why we had waited until the last minute. We didn’t we just apparently were not going to have near the collection of minutes that most first timers have! I arrived at the hospital at roughly 6 in the morning and had no clue that I would have a baby in my arms before lunch. I cannot say much went as I expected it to that day but then again, in thinking about it, not much since then has.
In thinking about my girl, she is somewhat of a veritable cornucopia of the unexpected. She never ceases to amaze me. Her vocabulary may very well be larger than mine, and as my readers know, that’s saying something because you all know me and my exorbitance of words. For the love of Pete she always correctly uses adverbs! Adverbs! Her interests are massively diverse. To demonstrate this point I feel the need to list for you her current list of occupations she wishes to pursue upon adulthood. She has aspirations to be a policeperson, fireperson, pilot, paleontologist, ballerina, doctor, construction worker, veterinarian, farmer, EMT, geologist, teacher, ninja, gardener, scientist and in a recent and surprising development a crime scene investigator. Hopefully, that gives you some ideas of the individual I am dealing with here.
She absolutely adores anything pink (she prefers to be hot pink but she’ll accept most shades) and sparkles. I lean more purple myself but she honestly inherited that love of all that glitters. Yet on the flip side of this she will also happily educate me on the different types of volcanoes and correct me if I make the grave error of inaccurately calling a construction vehicle a bulldozer instead of an excavator. She is a beautiful juxtaposition walking elegantly as princess and playing gleefully in the dirt. She has never met an animal she didn’t like, except for spiders and even they will get a gentle but firm talking to as they are hastily removed from her general vicinity. She can cause my blood to boil within my veins with her stubbornness and can as quickly melt my insides like ice cream on an early August day by catching me off guard with a sudden hug and “I love you, Mama.” She is sugar and spice and all that’s nice but in the right circumstance don’t be surprised to find the surprise puppy dog tail. She is very literally everything. Just like what she means to me.
Prose and Possibilities 