This is not my first mother's day. I was pregnant at this time last year but did not yet know it. Or perhaps in my heart, I already did. A week later, I would board that airplane from Columbus, Ohio to Boston, Mass. and as the story goes, I would feel the turbulence within before the plane had even left the runway.... This is not my first mother's day. But it is the first one in which I will wake to the cries of a ruddy-faced infant who will immediately recognize me as I hover over her crib, as I do every morning. She will recognize me, perhaps as nothing more than the dairy queen who speaks in high octaves and who seems to keep within a three foot radius from her at all times. She does not know that I carried her for ten months and have the stretch marks to prove it. She has no memory of the time we got stuck in a snow storm for seven hours in a car and all we subsisted on was a power bar and water and my running commentary to the nutjob Santa on the radio. She does not know that she has exceeded my every expectation of what a small whirring suck monkey could do, and that's make the world a better place to live. Or maybe in her heart, she already does.

This message is not political, it is not pro-choice or Republican or green. It is pro-miracle. I don't know how God could think to create life out of the love of two people, to make it possible for one human bean to incubate a smaller human bean, to lodge that growing life just below the beating heart, so that as the wee form moves face down like a trapeze artist, she hears the steady pumping of her mother's heart bom-boom bom-boom bom-boom, I am here, I love you, you are mine.

This Mother's Day, I will wake to the sounds of tears, followed by a sweet voice from beside me, "You got her? You sure?" I will be sandwiched by two of my favorite people on the planet. If you listen close, can you hear our heart?