Only a few things have the power to wipe away the heavy burdens of everyday life. One of them is the start of a new life.

You can be surfing away on your own cresting bouts of depression, bouts most of us help along by letting our troubles compile and lump together so that even though each trouble by itself is small, we’ve built a really good wave of self-pity to ride. Then wham: one of your close friends texts you a picture of her new grandchild born only minutes earlier, and you fall laughing into the water.

I say I have two “happiest days of my life.” The first was the day I wed. The second was the day the doctors showed RJ and I the first picture of our daughter: a sonogram. Up until that day, Christina had just been a concept—something happening to my body and to the emotions of my husband and me. When I gazed down and saw a picture of her tiny body, I realized that we’d started a new life and, just like the day I wed, the world of possibilities had just become enormous. Here was a new being who was a product of love; but already her own person. She proved the point the very day she was born when, bucking the trends, she lifted her head on her own. The nurse placed her on my stomach and she raised up her head as if to get a better look at the woman and the man who had been talking to her for nine straight months. That simple act opened up a new chamber in my heart; a new pathway in my brain. I knew right then and there that I would be dealing with and loving forever the little person on my stomach.

Life is sometimes very hard, always challenging, filled with speed bumps, potholes, crash barriers, nails and tacks and the occasional chasm. The birth of a new person can lift you right up like a helicopter and let you sail over it all to your true destination: joy. It gets you there so quickly, you don’t even remember wanting to be happy or content in the first place.

Judy welcomes Lucas into the world

We waste so much time lamenting the challenges that reality presents. We forget that one of those realities is that there are still events, such as birth, that give us a gift―a treasure that is beyond comprehension in its worth: a new person to love.

Genilee Swope Parente