Happy Birthday, Chase Gross!

Posted in By Jordan 2 comments

One year ago tonight, my mind whirled as a lay on a cold hospital bed waiting for a new life to greet me in the morning. My induction would begin at 5:00am the next day. The next day I would be a mama. And I would have a new person. A totally brand new person who would be a part of my world forever. I wondered how my world would change and who my son would be. I wondered who I would become in my new world. I wondered and I waited and I tried to sleep. I tried to remember all that my life had been up until that day because I knew even the most solid and immovable things would be shifted in the twenty-four hours that would follow. I wondered where my head would be tonight, one year later.

At 6:34 tomorrow night, my baby boy will be a year old. A big, grand, magical, spectacular year old. I can't find big enough words to tell my son all that he has done in these short twelve months...how much magic he carries around, how much joy he has already spread without even trying. He came into a world that needed him so much. I think we even missed him before he was here. I think that there were big empty places in our hearts that hurt for him until he finally made his way into our world. He saved me. He's still saving me.

Before Chase was born, I could only imagine how much I would love him, and of course I didn't imagine big enough. But I imagined in the right way. I knew it would be a powerful and terrifying love, one that would turn everything I knew of this world upside down and rearrange it around him. I knew that I would spend every single one of the rest of the days of my life trying to show him how to survive in this world. How to love himself and trust himself. What I didn't and couldn't have imagined was the way he would love me and the way he would teach me things about survival and how to love myself from the minute he got here. The last three hundred and sixty five days have been, literally, everything - profound joy, unmanageable stress, utter exhaustion, mounting excitement, unstoppable love...a deep and resounding peace beyond anything I ever believed was possible. My world, my love, and my life have grown exponentially.

Chase Gross - Thank you for being born...thank you for being mine. Thank you for showing me that the best way to be your mama is to spend all my days seeking and loving and playing and smiling and chasing down my own self, so that I can show you how to do these things too. Thank you for bringing me such love. And, above all, thank you for being your sweet, precious, funny, curious, unbelievably strong and fast and skilled, brilliant, and beautiful self. You are too much for words. You are so much more than I ever could have imagined one year ago tonight, and I love you an endless amount...