Dear Emma and Gorgeous Girl,

Before I begin, I must explain why I am not referring to you, Emma’s beautiful sister, by name.  I don’t know your name, baby, so please forgive me.  

Girls, tucked into a special box that I have for you, is my purple Vera Bradley bag, all washed and folded.  I only recently retired it, and I’d like to tell you about it. The Language Arts teacher in me wants to tell you that it symbolizes incomparable strength, warrior spirit, and irreplicable grace (but not mine).

By the time you can read this and fully understand it, I’m sure you will know about your mom’s surgeries.  You’ll have heard it from her, and, when it’s time, you can read about it on the blog that I wrote throughout her heroic journey.  It’s important that you know how much she went through, how courageous and valiant she has always been, and how her body both endured torture AND created miracles.

Your mom had her own Vera Bradley bag that was all-too-often packed for her hospital stays.  What should have only been a bag for fun overnights with friends or with your dad turned into luggage for surgeries, blockages, and never knowing what was ahead.  From high school to college to P.A. school, that bag traveled to St. Barnabas, Morristown, and, most often, Mount Sinai.  

Not too long after your mom’s first hospital stay, I got my own Vera Bradley bag.  Sadly, I needed my own hospital bag, so I thought, “Why not ‘sort of’ match Roo’s bag?”  Easy to carry and colorful and festive, those bags got way too much use.

Girls, you are marvels in so many ways, including that your mom was able to carry you and bring you safely into the world.  She and your dad were able to create you through love, through hope, through faith (your mom’s middle name, which I had no idea would serve her so well), and through science.  Part of the wonder of this world is that there are methods and processes where a woman can experience pregnancy and experience her yearnings become reality.  May it remain that way, for the both of you, for your cousins, and for every woman who deserves her choice and her voice.

So, sweet girls, what seems like just a two decades old, slightly faded, and somewhat worn-out duffle is really so much more.  It’s proof that when resilience, sturdiness, and hardiness meet fragility, magic happens.  

I love you both so very much,

Grandma