It could have been so different.

 Content warning: this post contains references to traumatic childbirth.

"It's something that your brain and body will always remember," says my therapist. 

Every year, when the calendar flips to March, the sunny days mixed with cold ones, as the daffodils begin to rise and bloom, I remember. 

I hold space in my heart and during my days for the conflicting feelings. The joy, pure joy of a birthday - the celebrations, the little touches to make it special.

And I remember how this day almost wasn't. I remember how my only clear memory of it was coming to in the ICU minutes before the clocked ticked over to a new day. The uncertainty of our future. "We don't know if he is okay," Caleb said about our baby. 

"It feels heavy," I say to my therapist.

The heaviness is the weight of the divide marking the before and after. A return for me to allopathic medicine and away from homeopathy, chiropractors, yoga, the holistic community I'd felt a part of. A sense of loss of what I thought would be. The realization that though this may be the day of the birth, it is not the day I first saw my baby, that was the next day... or the day that I held him, that didn't come for several days after... or the day that I saw his face without machines, that's a different anniversary... it's not the day his feeding tube came out, or the day I spent the night with him for the first time, alone in the NICU. I'm not sure which day we realized he didn't have any complications from the birth or that my complications were resolved... those anniversaries came months or even over a year later. 

It feels heavy. 

I lean into the gratitude, filled with a heavy sense of wonder, if wonder can be heavy, that I have been able to experience the past few years with my family. It could have been so different. "I love you," I whisper to each of them again and again before bed, kissing their faces, and holding them close. "I love you."