I named them Lily and Grace.
Not because everything suddenly became easy.
It didn’t.
There were specialists.
Appointments.
Therapies.
Questions about their future that no doctor could fully answer.
There were exhausted nights when I cried in the bathroom because I didn’t know whether I was strong enough.
But I learned something I wish I had understood in that hospital parking lot.
Being afraid does not mean you are incapable of loving someone.
And a diagnosis does not tell you who a child will become.
Years later, Lily became the loud one.
She loved music and danced whenever she heard a beat.
Grace was quieter.
She could sit beside me for twenty minutes flipping through the same picture book, laughing at the same page every single time.
They fought over toys.
They hugged each other after.
They drove me crazy.
They made me laugh.
And every birthday, I remembered the parking lot.
