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Dearest child,

Today I learned about you and I thought my heart might just burst out of my chest. You come to us as a wonderful surprise. Your father and I weren’t expressly trying for you, but we also weren’t taking any precautions. When you read this letter, later in your life, I want you to understand that from the earliest moment we knew about you, you were desperately wanted.

I have only just found out that you are on your way, and though there is some fear and anxiety, I have never loved anything as passionately as I do you right now. I say fear because childbearing, birth, and rearing is painful and frightening. Anxiety because I want nothing more in life at this moment than to give you the very best that I can.

You have become the most important thing in the world to me and I only just discovered that you are here.

Take your time, little one. Anxious as I am for your arrival. Take your time and when you’re here, don’t be in too much of a hurry to grow up on me, please. You are already perfect to me, and I want you to remember that forever.

Love,

Mom.

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Dearest child,

I felt you kick for the first time today. And again, soon there after. Something is going on with my hormones, nothing out of the ordinary the doctor told me, but I burst into joyful tears when I felt you moving. There are not the right words in the whole world to describe my feelings at this moment. I can’t write more, your father is almost home and I’m imagining his joy when I tell him the news. Oh I don’t know if I can bear it.

Love,

Mom

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Dearest child,

Today you entered the world. You’re lying there, within arm’s reach of me as I write to you, my hand is shaking so badly from the labour that I hardly know if you will be able to read what I write. They tell me that you were a normal delivery, though I don’t know how much credit I can give that particular statement. It felt as though I was moving heaven and earth to bring you into this world, I thought I would die from the shock and the pain, but apparently that is normal too.

I would do it all again. As soon as I looked into your beautiful dark eyes I knew that I would go through it all again for you. I would climb into the heavens and wrestle God himself just for the chance of holding you close to me.

Your father is asleep in the chair at the end of my bed. His hand is resting on your crib. The stress of the day must have been terrible on him, though I expect I’ll be believed when I say it was worse on me. I love you, little one, but I can’t hide from you the fact that bringing you into the world was the worst thing I can imagine physically happening to me.

I must sleep soon, my most precious one, but when you’re old enough and you read these words, remember that from your first moments drawing breath on this Earth, you were desperately loved by us. Today is the happiest day of my life, all of the pain leading up to holding you in my arms was worth it a thousand times over.

Love,

Mom

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Dearest child,

This morning you took your first steps away from me.

Maybe that’s a little dramatic to say. But something in my heart broke even as joy overtook my mind. You’re walking! Today you literally took the next step on your journey towards the life you’re going to lead.

But, child, there is something I want you to know. As I watched you take those first steps, walking away from me and into the laughing arms of your father, I remembered a life I might have lead, had things turned out differently. Before I go on, don’t you ever think that I would want anything other than you, your father, and the life we have together.

I want to tell you a story about the first man I ever loved. A story about loss, and grief, and moving on. A story about the day my world came crashing down around me.

When I was young, not near as young as you are as I write this, but maybe old as you are reading this, I loved a man. A boy, really, looking back on it. And watching you take your first steps today reminded me of him. Reminded me of the day he too walked away from me.

Please don’t mistake my intention, I don’t want you to think that I’m worried about you in the same way that I was for him. These first, beautiful steps of yours are a cause for joy, but there is something that you will have to learn and I don’t know if I’ll have the heart to tell you with words, so instead I write them here. This letter will be with the others, and when you’re old enough I’ll give them all to you.

His name was Kurt. Tall, strong, and handsome, kind with laughing blue eyes and gentle hands. I met him in university, he was a couple of years older than I, and as we fell in love, moving though those days that I remember almost as a dream, he graduated and was called up. Conscription for fighting aged men was mandatory in those years; the enemy was right on our doorstep and each citizen had to do his part. None of us thought anything of it, not really. The service was just something he had to do, and when he returned, we would pick up where we left off and continue building our life together.

Oh child. I’m sorry if my tears smudge the ink as I write, though the years have long since buried the past, the pain is sometimes too fresh to linger on.

Kurt was on leave in our home city. He had come home for the first time since being deployed to his regiment and the party must have lasted days; I’ll be honest I don’t remember most of it. But I remember him, and I remember being happy. Despite his service, despite the tensions we read about in the papers, no one thought that our world could change. We were happy.

On that day, the one you’ll learn about in class one day and may already have studied by the time you read this, a festival took place. We spent the day on games and rides, singing and dancing with our friends – right now those last hours seem almost like a dream.

We all gathered, Kurt, myself, and our friends, on a large hill on the outskirts of the city. There was quite a crowd gathered there, because we were going to do something special. Something that we were certain we would remember forever. In a way, we were right.

Each of us held a balloon in our hand. It was a silly thing, really. Not stupid, I won’t say that, but silly. With our hopes and dreams of what we wanted to accomplish held close as we released them, all of us at once, and watched them soar into the twilight sky, the glow of the festival glimmering on their sides as they flew away from us. 99 balloons carrying our hopes out into to the world.

I won’t pretend to know what happened. I won’t pretend to know what the East saw on their radar screens as we threw our youthful optimism into the sky. Even though I know it is impossible, even though I know that our little celebration had no influence on the course of the war, I can’t shake the certainty that it scared them. A huge and unexpected mass of something suddenly appearing in the sky. As I said, tensions were high in those days, dearest child; we were on the brink.

For some reason, they scrambled their fighters, and our side responded. Stupid flyboys who thought they were some hero out of a bad movie. No one knows who shot first, but suddenly the war machine sprang to life. It opened up one eager eye and looked down on us, on my life.

Just days later, I stood with Kurt’s parents along with so many others, watching Kurt’s uniformed back as he marched away from me. I never saw him again.

Don’t linger on those thoughts. Don’t think too much about the past. Take from my little story, only this, I lost him that day. He died about a year into the years of war that followed, but that was the day I lost him, when he took his first steps away from me. My only hope is that it was quick; that he didn’t have time to suffer.

Why do I tell you of this, my dearest one? I tell you because I want you to know, based on a story I might not have the strength to tell you in person, about how a life can be turned so completely upside down and how something wonderful can still come of it. Kurt, who still holds a special place in my heart even as I write this, is dead and yet through the war and the reconstruction, I was able to meet with your father.

Though I miss Kurt, I’m not ashamed of admitting it, I would trade my life with Johannes and you for nothing in the whole of the world or in the past. What’s done is done, and what I have is more than I could have ever imagined. You are more precious to me than perhaps you will ever know.

Remember that forever.

Love,

Mom.

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My darling, Kurt

I wrote a letter to my daughter about you. More than one, at this point, though the one I mention is the one I shall put in her letter box for when she is older. I told her that I would not wish for anything to change, that despite the years of war and the horrors of the reconstruction, I am happy with my life. How would you respond to that, I wonder. Would you be angry with me for saying so? For not wishing you back to life?

There is not a week that goes past without my thinking of you, Kurt. I remember your smile, and your wishes for the life we planned to have together. But I am content with the life I have now, more than that, I am happy.

Do I wish that I could replace my life now with the one we dreamed of? Perhaps I once did. I remember the years after you died, the years spent in desperate hope for a better world, and in those times I wished so very hard for you to return. For your name, to be listed among the missing and not the dead, to be on the lists of released prisoners of war, to be mentioned in a phone call from the High Command. Now though?

Now I do not wish for that. It would be better if you had lived, not just for me but because it is always better for the world if good men survive. But I cannot be sad with the life I have now, even if you are not a part of it. I’m sorry Kurt. If you do get these letters after I burn them, forgive me.

Though I do not think you will have to. You were never a jealous or an angry man.

Today I took her to the park and saw your parents walking by and the sadness in their eyes for the life they could have had when they saw me and looked at her. We did not speak, a small smile and a gentle wave was all we could manage before they went on their separate way. We are visiting my parents and so I could see the hill where our life together ended. I sat on that bench for hours, Kurt, letting her play with new friends and toys, staring at that hill.

It brought back all kinds of memories for me. Memories of hope and fear and sorrow. It brought you back to me. Your smile and the kind words you always had for me. The gentleness in your last letters from the front.

Even the last words you ever spoke, said right before I watched you turn and march away from me. The words that, I think, helped to give me the courage to move on. To find Johannes and have our daughter. “If I don’t make it back… I love you.”

How I cursed you for going. For not abandoning your duty and staying with me. I wanted you. I needed you. You were mine. One soldier could make no difference on the front.

How much I loved you for those words. With that one sentence, you set me free, though I did not know it at the time. It was your way of giving me permission to be happy. Permission to move on. Not everyone needs it, most of my friends did not. But I did; the knowledge that you would only have wanted me to be happy. Not another war widow in black, staring at an empty hill top where the world came to an end.

My daughter ran up to me, snapping me out of my thoughts. She handed me a balloon – do you remember the balloons? – and asked me to take care of it. A shiny red balloon. Just like the ones we had set free all those years ago to send our hopes and dreams soaring up high. Just like the one that I found, nestled in the rubble after the first bombs fell on our city.

I thought of you. And I let it go.

Yours,

Anna.

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This story was inspired by 99 luftballons by Nena in 1983