CELEBRATION
The 21 Year-Old Miracle
My favorite old soul celebrates a milestone
Twenty one years ago I witnessed a miracle. It was actually the second one I had seen in so many years but this one, the birth of my daughter, was starkly different than the first.
Two years prior, my son was extracted forcefully, with a fat lip resulting from a cold pair of forceps clamping unceremoniously across his face. It didn’t take long to conclude that the high pain tolerance for which he is still known to this day was likely the result of having his face squeezed by a comically medieval-looking contraption as he made his way in the world.
My daughter, on the other hand, was born far more regally, via a Caesarean section that seemed to take no longer than 90 seconds from beginning to end. She wasn’t just born, she made an entrance.
Thankfully, she was jam-packed with lifesaving platelets, the result of many months of prenatal treatment necessitated by a condition created when my wife and I conceived both kids. She also had a full head of downy brown Irish-German hair that, when dry, pointed in about 63 different directions.
That quietly fierce beginning was the best indicator possible of what Lily would become over the next 21 years: fiercely independent, fiercely confident, and best of all, fiercely loyal.
Born with the ultimate old soul, she is at the same time calm, experienced, and clear-eyed, yet somehow still anxious to experience what’s next. It seems like old souls should get bored with life, as if they’ve seen it so many times that they’d simply lose interest. But in Lily’s case the exact opposite is true. She chews life up and spits it out, only to wake up the next day ready to do it all over again.
She loves human connection, creating relationships so tight they feel like family, and exploring parts of the world she’s never seen. Somehow able to focus at will for hours at a time, she mapped out a path for herself at such a young age that she seemed to be born with it already drawn out in a tattered notebook.
Today, she hits one of those mythical milestones that are incredibly important in the moment but that can get lost in the future fog of getting older. But knowing her as I do, she’ll somehow take a day that from the outside looks like 8–10 hours of migraine-inducing studying for a nursing final and turn it into something far more special.
Happy birthday you fierce old soul. I hope it’s a day to remember.
