for all the years without you

Dear Shoghi and Maxwell,

The house is quiet; everyone has gone to bed. You are both sleeping peacefully, beautifully, gracefully in your beds. Your sweet hands moved, Shoghi, when I bent to cover you with your blanket, one I bought about a year before you were conceived. Maxwell, you lay there quietly when I just now spread the blue blanket I crocheted with my longing hands some four years before you were born. You are going to be ten months old this week - it's so close to a year ago that you were born into my hands and my life. I can barely contain the love I feel for you; you are both so perfect and miraculous.

I believe that there is a spiritual essence to our relationship - you my sons, I your mother. There is a place within us that connects and communicates with meaning deeper than words. I believe that, in some way, you know what paths I have traversed, what sacrifices I have offered up, what difficult and profound growth I had to achieve in order to become your mother.

For fifteen long years I tried to bring you to life. I sought you out first in the rose gardens, and then in the depths of the cold oceans - I even searched through the deserts of the world, just to catch a glimpse of your beauty and life. Sometimes I thought I had reached you, only to discover that it was just an illusion, a cruel hoax, and I was devastated by loss. Finally, in the end, I gave everything up. I opened my clenched fists, and let everything go. And it was there, in that place of detachment from all the places I had been searching, that I found you - within myself, in the deepest heart of my heart. I found you in joy.

When I am with you now, I delight in your curiosity, I soar on the waves of your laughter, I rejoice in your discoveries. Over these months that you have taken on your physical lives, I have bent and bowed to your needs with love, as mothers do, and I have healed for it.

Maxwell. Shoghi. My sons. Now I know. I know why those years were filled with such terrible longing and sorrow and search - it was the loss of being with you. You were known to my heart before you were known to my arms and eyes. You are the fruits of my joy and my heart and everything that is good and pure about who I am - you are the embodiment and the breath of life and love.

For every difficulty we face, know that the distances I traveled on my journey to our reunion were far greater. I have found that place within myself, that place of creation. We emerged from that place as a family. To say that I love you is but the most pitiful attempt to capture the glory of the sun in a drop of water.

I am, and with deep gratitude ever will remain, your mother.