When I discovered you, I felt so many different feelings all at once. I felt anxious. I felt worry. I felt scared. Fear and excitement were in there, too. All I had to do was take one look at my counterpart and I knew that you, and if only you, were safe. That was my job. As a mother, I am familiar with the role of protecting and keeping my babies, who I witnessed grow into toddlers and are now my children, cocooned and nestled within.

When he first found out about you, he only felt one thing: Elation. His happiness was so tangible that I thrived off of it and fed my insecurity with his hope until I was drunk off of his smile. No matter the obstacle, he had a reason why you were solution to the unforeseen problems I could conjure up at any moment.

When we first saw you, it was clear to both of us that you were made from us, and we were made for each other.

So it only stood to reason: You were perfect.

We couldn’t have known that my body would fail you the way it did and for that, I feel only one thing: Loss.

You were in the shell of me but all around you were what-ifs. My body did only half of its job in just a small part of the vast area that you were encompassing. My body- the one that unfailingly does headstands and runs for miles to no avail- could not do the very thing it was born to do.  Any sudden move- from either one of us- could have caused potential harm to you. Or me. Or both of us. You would have had two sisters, and as their mother, I needed to think about them.

Because of you, I know what it is to love something I have never seen. I know that my heart is capable of missing someone that it will never know. I will never know you. I will never see you. And if you can understand this, I see you and all of the future you’s in your father. The way he focuses when he is working diligently on something, albeit his laptop or his highly-addictive iPhone. The way his face brightens up when a pretty actress in a movie he’s seen a countless amount of times crosses the screen of his brand new television and he tries to play it off as if I am imagining it. Because the truth is, as I know I will always love you and always never know you, I knew I loved your daddy the first night his face brightened up as I stood there, he walked up to me, and our skin brushed each other’s.

He tried to play that off, too.

I see you in the ways I can’t understand him. I wonder if those things would have been passed on to you and I would have had to try harder to comprehend why you do certain things, thus making more of an earnest effort to better understand both of you. The way he has to do three point four things at once, just to stay focused. I wonder if you would have picked up my sensitivity- a level so deep he can’t fathom sometimes- but so nicely paired with his ability to drop whatever he is doing to comfort me, now that you are gone.

You would have been so adored by him. He is a big talker, always blathering on about being tough and raising the toughest. He also brings me coffee every morning on the weekends, without ever asking me if I really need him to do it.

The way he loves me is the way he would have loved you.

The way I love him is why I will never stop loving you.

The way we love each other is how we will heal and cope with the reality that you are gone.

Your mom and dad will share the memory of you until we are old and gray, watching your siblings grow up and we will know that the parts of them that are a wonder to us are probably the parts of you we never knew. And in that, we will find comfort.

I will always remember your movements, even though they were short lived. They are forever etched in my mind. You found your thumb even when you were kicking up a storm on that little monitor that allowed me to see into your world.

I am forever and ever deeply sorry that I couldn’t let you into mine.

We love you always, little guy.