I don’t know which love is greater, the love I share with my husband, or the love I have for my children. More than intertwined, they are deeply tangled. To try and choose, would require unraveling their knots of time, and pulling them apart would cause too much pain. 

Both of these loves began with worry. Early on love's seed was barely planted, still loose beneath the soil.  I should have been nurturing it's newness but instead raced ahead. I was worried about what loss would feel like, before love even had time to take root, grow and blossom. 

The story of my husband and I began with a dance. Something moved in me that moment when he took me in his arms. We danced the way my parents did, after spending half their lives together. And like my parents, my husband and I are both tall, yet still somehow I felt small and light within his arms, as if we were floating across that room. 

“ I like helping you..” My daughter Zoe tells me. We are cruising through our neighborhood grocery store, as I weave through the aisles, with my shopping bag overflowing and hanging from the back of Zoe’s wheelchair. Zoe expertly balances a half gallon of milk, green bananas and a loaf of crusty bread on her lap as she goes on.. “ I need to learn this stuff,  how to be a Mom for when I grow up. I have been thinking about this....” Her words stop and start again, as she retrieves the word she was looking for and finishes the string of her sentence. She ends with most difficult question. “ Is it hard to be a Mom?” She is smiling, happy to imagine her future- self this way.

I can’t imagine Zoe being a Mom. She is 11, and without detailing her prognosis, and debating the opportunities for adults with intellectual and physical disabilities, there are basic truths I have come to accept; Zoe’s metabolic disorder is progressive, her generalized epilepsy diagnosis is complex, and looking into the future makes my heart hurt.