An Open Letter to a Daughter Without a Mother

Every time I looked at her, it was like the first time. She had a smile like the sun. It radiated an exuberant warmth that enveloped and wrapped around you like the ocean; a smile that she loved to share. She was always yelling out of excitement, perhaps because she was always so happy to be around, to be alive. She told me, though, that way before we met, she wasn’t like that at all. She used to tell me about how, as a young woman, she felt empty. She used to say how alone and sad she always was. I always found it hard to imagine her being that way. I loved being around her. When we were together, it felt like nothing else even mattered. Everything she said sounded like music and even the silence was better when we were together. She was beautiful, she was my angel, and when she got pregnant, she was so much more.

We were young when it happened. Not children by our own description, but young all the same. It was something we both had wanted though. So, when it happened, we were ecstatic. First it was disbelief, a constant stream of “Are you serious?” on my part as she laughed and excitedly pulled out test, after test. Then tears. Mostly from me as I found myself in a whirlwind of emotion just simply saying, “Thank you” over and over again. I always thought she’d be a great mom, she loved kids. So did I, but not the way she did. She looked at every child the way an artist looks at a blank canvas. I was nervous, though. Suddenly, all the sureness in myself, that I had previously, was gone and now I had to wonder, “Can I handle this?” But I found myself at ease, whenever she would talk about it, because I could tell how much faith she had in me.

It wasn’t until she was at the start of her second trimester that she felt you. As we relaxed in our old apartment talking into the late night, she suddenly sat upright with a look of surprise on her face exclaiming, “Oh my god.”

Ha. Looking back on it I realize how much of a panic I broke into. I told her, “What?! Oh my god, are you okay?” suddenly standing as I frantically tried to think of a solution to a problem that didn’t actually exist yet. “Angel, are you okay, do you need something, do you want to go to the doctor, do you want me to get you something?” Words were just falling out of my mouth as I tried to desperately take some sort of hold on the situation. But then, as the shock fell away from her face and she sank back into her seat, she raised her hand to her mouth, and as a smile formed around her eyes. I always thought I saw tears, but she denies it. She looked up at me, still standing and she said, “I felt it…”

“What?” I responded, practically begging for answers.

She threw her hands up around me and said gleefully, “I felt it!” My shoulders fell and all the tension that I felt left my body and joy and relief filled me as I realized that she was talking about you. She would later joke and tease me about my panicked attempts to protect her from a nonexistent threat, but I actually think that she was touched by how worried I was. Every time after that when you moved, it was like you were just reminding us you were there. But that first time… It was different. She said that, “It felt like a butterfly just fluttered across my stomach.”

The next few months were easier. We spent more time than ever with family. Haha. I realize now that the older women who had children were offering up advice about things that I had never considered, while all the men seemed to only have one general piece of advice, “Be there for her when she needs you, and when she doesn’t, get out of the way.” They said it mostly as a joke, but I kind of felt that there was a detached seriousness to it as well. We appreciated all the advice, I mean we were new parents and any advice was better than going in blind. But after around the twenty-first week, it got tougher on your mom. Her feet started to swell, she got really bad headaches that would even make her dizzy, and she always felt nauseous or sick. Sometimes at night, she would have these pains in her abdomen that would hurt so bad that she couldn’t sleep, which meant I wouldn’t sleep.

The doctor’s advice was to just be cautious, but not to worry, and that was more comforting than anything our relatives could say. I’m not sure if that’s a good or a bad thing. She went to school and was obviously qualified, but she was a stranger all the same. She was a really nice ethnic woman, maybe Latin. She had thick dark hair that your mom noticed the first time they met. She even complimented her on it in our first appointment. Your mom handed out compliments like candy. She liked our doctor. I guess that’s why, even though we were both nervous when the due date rolled around, we weren’t scared.

I’ve told this story a lot. Never in detail. And never to you. I guess this is just the hard part.

Your mother was in labor for eleven hours. She was having trouble dilating and it got to the point where they had to do an emergency cesarean on her. I couldn’t believe how scared I was, as she laid there in agony, even after the pain medication. They prepped her for surgery and they started it as soon as they could. Everything went relatively smoothly for a while. That is up to the point when they got you out.

You were both so quiet.

They took you into another room to try to get you fixed up. They told me you were suffering from birth asphyxia. They couldn’t tell me anything else. They forced me out of your mom’s room shortly after that. She started to seize and I guess I started to panic. I sat there waiting for what felt like forever before someone told me that you didn’t get enough oxygen during her labor, but you would be okay. They wouldn’t let me hold you for a few more hours after that. Your mom never got to.

The world felt so quiet.

They said that she was suffering from eclampsia. Her blood pressure was too high and it was causing her to have seizures, had they been able to treat her sooner, they may have done more. But they did the best they could. You were born at 2 AM. I got to finally hold you, wrapped in that pink blanket in your room about 3. She died around 4. That was over 17 years ago now. And every day I miss her. Every day I thank her for giving me my beautiful daughter. Every day I thank her for giving me you, Angel.