Lily is Six

Fortieth birthday came and went with little fanfare; in truth, but for the constant questions as to what my "big plans" were, it seemed like a blip on the radar screen. But tonight, although I was up until nearly 4 the night before, I am not so sure I am going to be able to sleep--all I can think about is this night six years ago, nearly to the minute, when Lily was born, and everything changed irrevocably.

I now cannot help but thinking of my life as "before" and "after," meaning that an almost impenetrable ravine exists between the part of my life before I had children and every instant since. Do I think this is too dramatically stating the case? Not for me, and not, I think for many people I know. It is hard for me, sometimes, to recall the "before" parts now in any way that doesn't seem like a dream. But this night, December 19th, 2003, the dividing line, as it were, I know will remain real, concrete, alive, for as long as I live.

It is true that I don't remember it seamlessly. Certain parts are blurry--I can access faces of loved ones popping in and out, the race down the corridor, the way my mother looked at one moment as the doctor was speaking to me, the Indian accent of the anesthesiologist, and so on. But other parts, scenes, are so visceral that my eyes well up if I so much as conjure them into re-existence: the moment my eyes met Lily's for the first time, for example, the tiny, soft yellow outfit my grandmother had knit for her to come home in, and the strangeness of trying to get it on her tiny limbs in the hospital room the frigid morning we brought her home.

I was just having a conversation with a friend about how in a way, there are no right choices, or wrong choices: there are only choices, and we make them, and then we take it from there. It's the unknown, the "after the choice," if you will, that defines us, and the way we respond to what we can't or don't choose: what happens to us, as we plough ahead, perhaps thinking we actually have more choices than we do.

I am such a skeptic, such a pragmatist. I have always, since very early childhood, been one of those people who believes you make your own luck, that the notion of fate or destiny is a bit of a fool's gold--shiny and appealing but worthless in the end. But somehow, although it defies logic, and my very core, I also believe on some level that Lily and I chose each other, and I felt that way six years ago, when I lay on a narrow gurney late in the night before we almost lost each other, and looked into those eyes and in that looking, that lock of connection, for the first time in my entire life lost sight of everything else in the world.