But I’ll be honest. It hurt a little.
I never had children of my own. Mark and I tried for a few years. It didn’t happen. The doctors couldn’t tell us why. After a while, we stopped trying, and I stopped crying about it.
Because I had Hannah.
I went to every parent-teacher conference. Every dance recital. Every soccer game in the pouring rain. I helped her with her college applications at the kitchen table at two in the morning. I held her when her first boyfriend broke up with her in tenth grade, and when her grandfather died, and
when she didn’t get into her first-choice school.
And every year, on her birthday, I watched her wait by the mailbox.
The first time was her seventh birthday.
We had a party in the backyard. Eight little girls from her first-grade class. A cake shaped like a castle that took me two days to make. Pin the tail on the donkey. A piñata shaped like a unicorn.
