The Letters

By Linda Hastings
©2001

"Well, it's confirmed, you're pregnant", the Doctor said. I looked at him as if he were speaking a foreign language. After all, 7 years and 4 months had passed since I had married my high school sweetheart and we were still childless. Oh, we hadn't really 'tried' for me to get pregnant all that time, but the last few years was definitely in the category of 'trying'. We had been taking my temperature, watching the calendar and in a final desperate measure, began infertility treatments and fertility drugs.

I can still hear the advice of so many people in my family and our friends already with children of their own. "Don't try so hard and it will happen". "Relax, you're just too uptight about this". "Quit thinking about it all the time". And my most favorite one of all, "Buy a house, you always get pregnant when you can't afford it". So we bought a house, a new car, a boat, another new house and still we couldn't conceive.

The romance had gone out of our bedroom and our intimacy was now on a schedule that I kept by the bed. Bill was in construction, working out of town during the week and coming home on weekends. When it was "time" he would drive all night to get home. Exhausted and weary, we would follow the instructions of our doctor and he would leave in the wee hours of the morning to make it back to his job site in time.

For the first several months after the doctor confirmed my pregnancy, I refused to believe it was true. With no real symptoms like morning sickness or fatigue I convinced myself that it may not be true and therefore prepared myself for the let down when the truth were known.

One night while visiting my best friend out of town, as I lay perfectly still next to my sleeping husband, I felt this strange sensation - like someone plucking a spring in my tummy. It was then and there that I believed.

Ashley Christine was born that next February at the end of fourteen long and laborious hours. Later that night, Dallas/Fort Worth would be blanked in the biggest snow storm of the present century. I awoke to a wonderland of white - and pink!

The first night when I finally made it home from the hospital and got my daughter, my husband and my mother to sleep, I sat down and I wrote my precious new daughter a letter. I told her of how I had prayed so long and so hard for a child. That I asked God not for a perfect child or even a healthy child, but for a happy, loving and caring child and no matter what he gave me I would be thankful and proud and honored by his 'gift'.

I sealed the letter and placed it in her baby book.

The following year, when she turned one, again I waited until everyone had left the party and my beautiful little one year old slept to again take pen in hand and write to her.

Writing the letters soon became as much a part of having her birthday as making her cake. Each one would chronicle the past year and all the things only a Mother sees and remembers. She was everything I had asked God for, loving, kind and happy.

By the time we celebrated her second birthday, she had already been introduced to her two-week old baby sister, Regina. In keeping with my tradition, year after year, I would sit down alone in the quiet hours following their party and write the girls a letter. Through tears of joy and smiles of pride, I shared my personal feelings and observations with them.

The girls are grown now, Ashley recently graduated from a local University and Gina is in her third year of college as well.

The letters?

On their 16th birthdays, along with the cake and presents and family and friends came one final gift.

Stacked one on top of the other and tied with a dainty pink ribbon were seventeen handwritten letters from Mom.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Linda has been writing for a number of years now and writes about true experiences that are near and dear to her heart. Many of her stories are tributes to family members. In addition to writing, Linda is a full time Executive Assistant with two grown daughters and a loving husband that enjoys spending leisure time with her on the lake or on their Harley Davidson. Linda's love for writing stories began when her children were small; she would create tales to entertain them using their names and their friends as the characters. Linda's stories have been published in "Chicken Soup for the Soul", the book and the weekly newspaper syndicate, "Fort Worth Business Press" and several other local newspapers. Linda can be contacted at lghastings@embarqmail.com