Anna was born on January 23, 2001, ten days before this picture was taken. Mark—her father, my spouse—is holding her here for the first time, and I am recording the encounter. She weighs five pounds, and she is cherry red, still raw from the difficulty of a breach birth, one month premature.
How to covey this labor of love, not the love of parent for parent, but the outpouring of love from two men, two women, towards the creation of this little being? Each of us knows the importance of love, the essential nature of unconditional love, and each of us participates in creating this movement, this flow of outwardly directed love which has created this child and which we will to carry her along in her journey through life and living.