Dear Sami,

I write to you on this Mother’s Day — the little guy who made me part of this tribe.

I remember when you first made your presence known, in the form of two pink lines that formed an “x” on the pregnancy test. I hadn’t “planned” on you but you had planned on me, hadn’t you? From the moment I found out about you, I knew that you had picked me somehow. I didn’t feel worthy–and sometimes I still don’t–of the awesome job of being your mother. But I put that aside every day and I do what needs to be done. I change your diapers and I try to feed you and I try to show you how to love yourself and to be kind to others. I try so hard to be a good person myself and I screw up all the time, but I love you so very much.

Today you spontaneously said to me, “I love you,” and I don’t know if you even know what it means, but you said it in a way that felt so natural, I think you must. It was the best Mother’s Day present anyone could have given me — your simple words of love.

Sometimes I feel sad because you don’t have any living maternal grandparents. I wish you could have known your grandma. She was an amazing woman. She was creative, like you. Strong-willed, an anti-authoritarian, like you. Her “no’s” were shut down by her parents, who were doing the best they could at the time. But I am trying to appreciate your “no’s.” I recognize and applaud your healthy desire for autonomy and independence, which will show up in different ways at different times. I will do whatever I can to say “yes” to you as often as possible, and to be a compassionate witness to your upset when things don’t go as you’d wish them to. Your grandma would have approved of that, I think.

In the year before you born, I was in an MFA program for creative writing. While it seems silly, I was sort of stunned at how absolutely everyone, professors included, was writing about their mothers — the myriad ways in which they were molded, shaped, and almost always damaged by the women who gave birth to them. I was pregnant with you as I wrote about my own mother and read the stories others had written about theirs. In those months I felt a renewed awe at how deeply, how irrevocably, we mothers impact our children. I wondered, what might you write about me in twenty years? Would I give you plenty of material?

Right now, I am the largest nation in your world. I am your comfort and your home. You go off exploring, sometimes farther than I would like, but in the end you always want to come back to “snuggle mama.” My little snuggly boy. As you grow, you will need me less and less, I know. But I want you to always remember that I would like to be a home for you, a refuge. I would like you to see me as a place where you can rest and just be when the rest of the world might be trying to make you into a somebody whom you are not.

“Happy capitalist, Hallmark-created, flower-and-chocolate purchasing Mother’s Day to you,” said a friend in a message on my voice mail today. I had to laugh, because she is so right. I have bestowed so much importance upon this day. Before I became a mother, it was the day to call your grandma, the mother I barely knew, to write her cards and letters. After she died, it was my day to grieve her loss, to grieve what never was. For years after she died, I still wrote to her on Mother’s Day. Now I write to you both.

Isn’t every day Mother’s Day, really? When you become a mother, it is every minute of every day. It is forever. I will never be the same person I was before I pushed you, screaming, out of my body, and they laid you, screaming, on my chest. And I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Now that I am both mother and daughter, I am more sure than ever that every day is a day to celebrate the women who breathed for us for nine months, who released us from their bodies when we were ready to breathe on our own. Every day is a day to forgive them when they hurt us terribly, out of their own ignorance and pain and yes, their misguided love for us. Despite our very human flaws, we are the vessels through which life emerges. There is nothing more sacred than that, and nothing more mundane. Birth happens all the time, and it is so very miraculously ordinary. Life is everywhere we look, isn’t it? And isn’t it wonderful?

May you always know your own everyday beauty as a human, a son, and perhaps someday, as a father.

Thank you, Sami. Thank you so much for picking me to be your mother. I will do everything I can to be worthy of your choice.

With all the love you can every imagine (and then some),
Your mama