You were born in the midst of a May snowstorm, but that’s hardly the most remarkable thing about your birth story. Bringing you into this world took years of planning, hoping, and dreaming. The road to your arrival includes a tragic love story, the emergence and destruction of a superhero, a high tech scientific laboratory, a pandemic, and a myriad of plot twists worthy of a full length feature film (or perhaps even a trilogy).
For years your Father and I talked about having children. We tried, in the way many young couples do, but were somehow unsuccessful in growing our family beyond the two of us (and the menagerie of pets we’d acquired). At one point we were successful in conceiving the child who would have been your older sibling, but they were gone from the portrait we were painting for our future almost as quickly as they had first appeared. While we were still grappling with that loss, life suddenly threw us one of the most cruel and complex curveballs we could ever imagine.
At some point in your life, when you encounter difficulty, someone may say something like – “look, it’s not brain surgery!” While their point may be to belittle the extent of your struggle with a flippant retort, the remark they are making is rooted in the fact that brain surgery is really freaking hard. And it doesn’t matter if you’re the actual brain surgeon (although yes, their role is exceptionally difficult), the patient, or one of the people who has to sit by and wait to find out how successful the operation was… brain surgery is, indeed, really freaking hard. And your Dad had three of them in under a week’s time.
The first operation was largely successful, as 80% of the tumor invading his brain was ultimately removed. The second, also a success, as the massive hemorrhage created during the first procedure was repaired. And the third, also successful, as the neurosurgeon was able to relieve the swelling that developed in the days following the first two efforts. But as your Dad began to wake up, it was clear he was no longer himself. The series of operations had changed the very fiber of his existence.
Now I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t seen it for myself, but your Dad, who had previously been just a “normal guy” (normal to others, anyways, I always thought he was pretty exceptional), had emerged from brain surgery as an actual, honest-to-goodness superhero. Some of his doctors brushed it off as a drug and surgery driven delusion, but I saw it with my own eyes. No tall buildings were lept in a single bound, but marathons were conquered and, with the drive and determination your Dad displayed, I think he could have taken on a building if that’s what he’d put his mind to.
For 28 months, your Dad fought everything that was thrown at him. He knew that the cancer was unbeatable, but that didn’t stop him from fighting. All the while, we continued to dream about growing our family… we continued to dream about you. As the cancer (along with the medicine he was taking to fight the cancer) threatened to destroy that dream, he did what any good superhero would do. He found a way to outsmart the villain. He called in super friends (in our case a fertility doctor and her team of scientists) so that when the time was right, you could come to be. A lot of parents worry about the day when their child will come to them and ask “where do babies come from?” My only concern about that day is that I won’t be able to accurately explain the science behind the miracle that is you!
Your Dad desperately wanted to meet you (and, maybe he did — you’ll have to tell me when you’re older). Together we imagined the person you would grow up to be. We talked about all of the fun adventures we’d have as a family. Whose eyes you’d have (they’re mine). Whose smile you’d have (it’s his). It breaks my heart to know that you will never have a photo of the two of you together. It hurts that you won’t get to squeeze him or wind your tiny fingers in to his beard and tug at it as you fall asleep in his arms. And I’m sorry that you’ll never get to hear him tell you any of the Dad jokes he’d been practicing for years. While there are so many things he won’t be here to give you, he wanted to make sure that you did have something special that was just from him: Your name.
I didn’t know if we were expecting a daughter or a son until the moment the doctor placed you in my arms. But your Dad had told me two years prior that our daughter would need a good strong name… Logan, just like The Wolverine. I told him that I would need to meet you first to know if the name fit. Not just any little girl can be named Logan, so I had to make sure that was really your name. It’s a superhero’s name after all. And I needed to make sure that you exhibited the same super strength as your Dad.
The world will forever talk about the year 2020 as a year of chaos and struggle. The history books will talk of a pandemic that swept the globe and a wave of civil unrest that swept through our nation. They’ll talk about how the economy collapsed as millions lost jobs. Baseball was shut down until July. Restaurants, theaters and public places were closed and boarded up, and families were forced to distance themselves from one another (also – murder hornets were briefly a thing). But, in the midst of all of this chaos… there was you.
You were born in the middle of a May snowstorm. I delivered you without a partner because your Dad had died, and the threat of a killer virus made it too dangerous to bring in a pinch hitter. I had a broken leg, which contributed to the complexity of your arrival. You were six weeks early and weighed less than 5 pounds. The nurses described you as feisty. There was no denying your super strength from the moment you came screaming into this world. You are a mix of the best parts of both of us. You are strong. You are super. You are Logan.
This isn’t how Travis and I imagined welcoming our first child into the world, but nothing about my life for the last 3 or 4 years is in any way how I imagined it would be. We started a pre-chemo family planning process not long after his initial diagnosis in hopes that he would somehow beat a seemingly unbeatable cancer, or at least be here long enough to meet his children. Watching and feeling this child grow over the past five months has been an incredible experience. I can’t wait to meet them and shower them with all of the love that I am so ready to give. I can’t wait to hold them in my arms and tell them that they are truly, and without a shadow of a doubt, The One.
Staring into the Sun 