Six years ago I celebrated my first Mother’s Day.

It was a quiet celebration. Very few even knew I was a mother, but just two days before I had taken a pregnancy test and it was positive!

I was so excited. “I’m pregnant. I’m pregnant. I’m pregnant.” It was all I could think about. Every single thing I did was different. Eating was different, sleeping was different, I think I even walked differently.

My heart was bursting with joy and love, I started imagining the future, circling the due date on my calendar: January 29th.

My best friend secretly slipped me a little Mother’s Day card at church. My mother in law gave me a beautiful precious moment’s statue of a pregnant mother and an embroidered handkerchief. My husband even wrote me a Mother’s Day card from ‘the baby’.

Four weeks later the bleeding started.

Faint at first, just a little spotting.

I scoured the internet, trying to figure out what could possibly be happening. I called my mom in tears. She tried to reassure me to calm down and be patient.

After a day it got heavier. The cramping started. I knew.

I remember grabbing the Mother’s Day gifts I had been so thrilled to receive and throw them in the bottom of a drawer. I didn’t want to see them. I didn’t feel like I had earned them. I felt afraid that I never would be a “real mother”.

I wish I could go back to Vanessa of 2009 and dig those gifts back out of the drawer and tell her: “You ARE a mother. You had a life inside of you. You loved that life and did your best to nurture and protect it. You ARE a mother.”

I’ll never forget my first Mother’s Day or the baby who first made me a mother. I hope to meet my first baby someday and tell him/her how very much he/she was loved.