Why did I wait so many years to bring Mikaela into the world???
Today is our youngest daughter, Mikaela’s 20th birthday.
You know how in life there are times when you’re so sure of what you’re doing, where you’re going and who are? Then there are those days/months, sometimes years where you just feel completely lost? I’ve had so many days of feeling lost, unsure of my steps, not knowing if I was going in the right direction. Never has this been more true than since I became a mom. The entire first year of Brianna’s life I was terrifyingly out of my league. I think I cried more than I laughed during those days, but man oh man did I love that little girl. She was a force to be reckoned with. She crawled before she was six months old, and was running all over the house by nine months of age. She began reading chapter books in kindergarten, and has never stopped. She was sensitive, brilliant, kind, and vulnerable. Then we were blessed with a second daughter, when the universe brought Dominique into our lives. She could not have been more different than her older sister. She was thoughtful, gentle, cuddly, and content to move at a very relaxed pace, or happy to allow her older sister to push her around the house in a toy stroller. She preferred dolls to puzzles and books.
They were wonderful, and terrifying all at once. And I loved them.
As I’ve shared many times before, I had big dreams, and many ambitions, motherhood wasn’t at the top of my list. Once I was in it, I was fulfilled, and felt beyond blessed to be able to be home with our girls, to watch them grow and to nurture them. Two was perfect. We had never even discussed having more. That was until we moved to San Diego at the age of twenty six. Everybody around us in our social group were having babies. I mean EVERYONE. One night we looked at one another and wondered if perhaps we too would want to try for one more, maybe a son? The answer was YES.
Just like it had been with the other two babies, pregnancy came quickly and effortlessly. Before I knew it I was plotting a nursery and what to do about accumulating all the baby necessities. I had long given all of our baby items away, due to moving to New Zealand post Dominique, then back to Toronto, and on to California. We had zilch, zero, nothing for a baby. We were beginning at the beginning once again. Brianna, seven, and Dominique five couldn’t wait to be big sisters, and we couldn’t wait to have our third baby. Because we had nothing for baby, we decided to cut down on the guesswork, and found out the sex. We were delighted to learn that we would be having another daughter. Secretly it was what we both wanted. I was obsessed with being a girl mom, and well, Yannick was the best damn girl dad I could have ever imagined. We were all giddy with anticipation. Then the magical day came. Mikaela was born. From the get go she was a blend of her two older sisters in personality, habits, and character traits. It didn’t take long for our little family, and every single other person who met her to fall in love with her. She was enjoyable, easygoing, confident, assertive, but agreeable. She didn’t wake every couple of hours like Brianna, nor did she sleep twelve hours a night like Dominique, she was a six hour kind of sleep at a time baby. She enjoyed books, puzzles, dolls, and dress up. She’s not Brianna, or Dominique. No sir, Mikaela is wonderfully unique, an incredible young woman all her own. My heart swells with love. I have to remind myself to let life unfold as it should for her, because I’m so excited to see who she will become in this big beautiful world of ours.
And today, at twenty years old, as I reflect on all the things she has taught me, and gifted me over these two decades of being my daughter, the only thing I don’t have an answer to when it comes to her…Why did I wait so long to add her to our family??
Hmmm, hmmm, hmmm…
