For eighteen years, I believed one of my sons had died shortly after birth.
I had mourned him.
I had buried him.
I had learned how to celebrate birthdays with an empty place at the table.
And then, on the eighteenth birthday of my surviving sons, a small box appeared on my doorstep with four words written across the top:
“Happy birthday, brothers.”
Those words changed everything I thought I knew about my family.
My husband, Watson, and I had dreamed about becoming parents for years.
For five long years, we went through treatments, appointments, disappointments, and more emotional pain than I ever thought we could endure.
Every time another attempt failed, we told ourselves to keep going.
Eventually, after years of hoping, we finally received the news we had been waiting for.
I was pregnant.
We were going to be parents.
Then, during an ultrasound, the doctor gave us another piece of news we never expected.
We weren’t expecting one baby.
We were expecting three.
Triplets.
Watson and I were overwhelmed.
We cried.
We laughed.
We worried about everything from cribs and diapers to whether our small home could somehow hold three babies.
But underneath all of that was an enormous sense of happiness.
After five years of trying, we were finally going to have our family.