Makayla's Book

Time for the next installment of my ONE Project.  This time, it is my friend and fellow Board member, Makayla Jade Harris.  Good luck making it through this one without getting a little misty.  

Here's Makayla's story:

I was sitting here packing for Texas school- 100% ready to call Larry and bail on our portrait shoot for his “one project”.   He told me to pick ONE object to be photographed with, one object that if your house is burning down (family, pets, etc are safe)  you would grab first, that you couldn't live without.  I had been thinking about this for a while and honestly felt a lot of shame that ONE thing didn’t immediately come to mind….

And then as I was putting all of my weight on top of my suitcase to get it to closed, I looked over and it found ME.  I was surrounded by the chaos of moving boxes I still have waiting for me to decide to donate… and sitting right on top of children's books… was Nancy Tillman's words “on the night you were born”  it was as if those words were calling me.  

Not in the same way they did 11 years ago when my first born rebuilt my entire body making his entrance into this world,  not in the ways I used those words as a mantra to get me through all those early, sleepless nights, not in the ways that his little hands touched that book as we read it together, and not even in the way that same book repeated history when our little birdie was born 2 years later.  

No, this time those words hit me in a completely different way. It was as if they were speaking to me, telling me it was the night that *I* was born.  Becoming a mother was a rebirth for me. That night the world as I had known it completely shifted and everything I thought or did was seen through a whole new lens.  

The night I became a mom was the night I was reborn.    

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