He shut the hell up and just held my hand with both of his.
“Baby’s almost here!” the doctor said. “Push!”
“Argh!”
“Push!”
“Fuck!”
“Push!:
“Ahhhhhhhh!”
And then, breaking through the screams, the pain, the sheer agony that I felt, there came the most beautiful sound in the world.
My child crying.
I heard my baby before I saw it, but it was a moment I knew I’d never forget. It was all worth it. It had arrived. This most precious, this most beautiful, this most awe-inspiring of moments…
My child was born.
“It’s a boy!” the doctor said.
All of the pain seemed to wash away right then. Nothing else mattered. My baby boy, my son…
My family had grown.
My child was here.
And he was the most beautiful, the most precious thing that I had ever seen in my entire life.
“He’s a little small, but he’s looking much healthier than we expected for being born early,” the doctor said. “Would you like to hold him?”
Tears streaming down my face, I nodded. I felt Garrett leaning over my shoulder, his breath caught, but my attention was only upon my son. I wasn’t even thinking about him being born early, though the reassurance that he displayed no visible issues was still an enormous relief.
“My son,” I said as he came into my arms for the first time.
Of course, he couldn’t talk. He was so little, so cute, so precious, so…so beautiful. But he looked up at me with those loving, doting eyes, and I knew right then that even if he could not say anything, if he didn’t even know how to use his tongue to talk, he was still saying, “I love you, Mom,” right there. I hitched with a joyful laugh, felt the tears streaming down my face, and started to cry tears of joy.
Life had given me so much tragedy along the way. There were far too many moments when I wondered what the point of going forward was, especially with the loss of both of my parents. Even when Mason encouraged me, I had seen how the darkness of life had affected him; he could say one thing, but his actions said another.
But no matter how many awful moments, no matter how many tragic moments, no matter how difficult the road had been to get to this point, this one single moment of bringing life into this world made it all worth it. This was what the point of going forward was. I had brought life into this world.
I had given life a chance to have the most beautiful and the most perfect future it could possibly have.
And then I looked over to Garrett. His eyes were lit up. They even watered.
And though I hadn’t had any doubts he would leave me before, I now had no doubts that he had never seen anything that he had loved like this before. It was, truly, perfect.
Garrett
Ihad never felt so…so in awe in my life before.
I was used to life being hell. I could mask it with jokes, with alcohol, with sex, and with all other sorts of “fun” vices, but temporary relief never did well enough to hide the underlining blackness that engulfed me.
And yet, when I saw my son—my only son, my son!—looking up at Hannah and then to me, it all just faded. I’d told Hannah that she was my everything, and she was. But so, too, now was my son. I couldn’t describe it.
It wasn’t something that had a title or a feeling to it. Words could approximate what I was feeling, but I truly understood now why Cole had pulled himself away from the violence. A child wasn’t just a new addition to a family; a child was everything. I would still run with the Black Reapers MC, and I would still do my part to grow the club.
