By the time you read this, you’ll be old enough to roll your eyes at birthday letters. That’s okay. I’m not writing it for that version of you. I’m writing it for the one who’s sitting somewhere years from now, wondering who he was at one — who he was becoming when two came to collect him — and who his mama was in the year she finally got close enough to your blueprint to read it.

I want you to know what this year looked like from the inside — the year you were one, racing toward two. Not the version people post. The real one.

— ✶ —

Here is the revelation — and I mean revelation in the biblical sense, the kind where light breaks in and you can’t believe you were ever standing in the dark: you are not behind. You are wired differently. And every single wire was put there on purpose.

The God who made you did not accidentally give you a nervous system that has to read the room with its whole body instead of just its eyes. He did not accidentally wire your sense of joy to the same circuit as your regulation. He did not accidentally make you a person who needs to feel information before he can use it. That’s not a defect in the blueprint. That IS the blueprint — and this was the year I finally got close enough to it to read what it says.

You are a sensory seeker. You don’t sit still because you are pulling information from everything around you the way the rest of us pull it from what we see and hear. You spin, you push, you crash, you climb — not because you can’t stop, but because your brain is building itself in real time and movement is the data. Every single member of your therapy team said some version of the same thing by the end of this year: he’s not resisting. He’s integrating.

I am going to carry that sentence like a talisman for the rest of my life, and I am going to hand it to you the first time the world tries to tell you to sit still.

You regulate through laughter. We figured that one out by accident on an ordinary Wednesday — you were spinning past the point where anything in my toolkit was going to reach you, and what finally worked was me making a face so ridiculous that you stopped cold, looked at me, and lost it. Full belly, dimples out, can’t-breathe laughter — and then, like a switch had been flipped, you were back. Regulated. Present. All the way in the room with me.

Your therapist has a clinical name for it. I call it your superpower, and I call myself blessed to have learned it in the year you turned two. The path to you, Ellison, has always run through joy. It probably always will. Do not let anyone ever talk you out of your need for lightness. The world is going to try — it always does. Let it try. And then make the face.

You are a process integrator — which is a term I learned this year, and which I will also admit describes your mama to an embarrassing degree, a trait that can be traced back generations on your Poppa’s side of the family. You watch everything first. You file it. And then one day, while the rest of the room has moved on and made up its mind about what you can do, you do the thing — completely, fully formed, like you built it in the background while no one was paying attention. Don’t ever let anyone mistake your processing time for absence. You are never absent. You are working.

— ✶ —

I’m not going to pretend this was an easy year, baby. You deserve better than the polished version.

Your mama spent part of this year rebuilding her own brain — coming off medications she’d been on for years, learning who she is without them, operating on maybe a fraction of the bandwidth she’s used to and trying like everything not to let you feel the weight of that. I don’t know how fully I succeeded. I know this: I showed up every single day. And so did you.

You also got a team this year. A real one. People who chose you before they even fully knew you — who showed up week after week to help your body do what your mind already knows it wants to do. Ashton, who made your legs strong one Tuesday at a time. Chelsea, who helped you find your words, also on Tuesdays. Claire, who spent half her sessions building your mama’s capacity to carry all of this, because it takes a village and ours was just getting assembled. Dennisha, who opened her doors so your therapy could happen in a space that felt like play. And Melissa, who is just beginning this week — coming to us to help us listen to your body and your movement needs better.

We learned some hard things too. Your feet need extra support to do what feet are supposed to do, and your muscles are working harder than most just to hold you upright — that is nobody’s fault, it’s just the particular engineering of the body God gave you, and we are helping it. Your orthotics arrived. This past week you wore them for the first time, and you didn’t fight them — not even a little, which surprised your mama more than it probably should have. Finding shoes that fit over them is its own puzzle since your feet are growing faster than anyone can keep up with, but already, even just an hour a day working up to six, they are helping stabilize your walk. Your gait is changing. I can see it. Finding all of this out was not scary. It was a door opening.

And then there was Bennett.

I won’t tell the whole story here — I already wrote you a letter about Cooper and Bennett and the love that changes hands. But right before your birthday, right at the edge of two, your brother with four legs laid down his work. He had carried me through everything. Through the years I was trying to build the life that was going to be yours. He was on the floor with me on my worst nights, and he was at the door the day I finally brought you home.

And then one evening, you were on his couch. Right in the center of it. Like the spot had always been yours.

It was.

He knew you could stand on your own, Ellison. That was always the deal. The day you found your feet was the day he could finally rest. He passed that watch to you as deliberate as Cooper passed it to him — and you received it the same way you receive everything: quietly, completely, without making a fuss about it.

That’s yours now. All of it.

— ✶ —

You don’t know this, and I don’t expect you to — you were one becoming two, and that is a full-time job. But I need you to hear it from me directly, in writing, so that someday you cannot doubt it: you are the reason I built everything I built this year.

The blog. These letters — including this one. The books I’m writing while you sleep. The business that carries your blood in its bones and your name on the door — even if only we know it yet. Every morning I got up before the sun and made something instead of collapsing — it was because of you. You are the why behind every word I have written this year, and you are the why behind every word I intend to write.

I wasn’t building for you the way people build things they might not live to see finished. I was building because of you — because you walked into a world that was not yet ready for you, and your mama was not going to let that stand.

We had two painful goodbyes this year — two preschools, two communities we had started to love, families and little people we both had to leave behind. The first because the structure of the building itself wasn’t right for your sensory needs. The second because the structure of the schedule and routine wasn’t right for you in that season. Both decisions broke something in me a little. Both were right.

What grew in the space they left was something I couldn’t have designed on purpose: self-led therapy in our driveway. Mama building your routines from scratch — therapy and school and home woven into one, because that was what you needed and I was going to be the one who built it.

That’s when Yaya entered the picture. We needed her. It turns out she needed us just as much.

The building IS the mothering. Every draft, every early morning, every hour I chose the work — that is me loving you with my whole chest. The way Letter One says to do it.

You taught me that this year, and you didn’t even know you were teaching me anything.

Congratulations.

— ✶ —

For Year Three, I am asking God for words. Your words. The ones I can already see stacking up behind your eyes, building in whatever order makes sense to a mind like yours. I’m not asking for words on anyone else’s timeline — just the ones you’ve been saving. In your own time. In your own voice. Whenever you’re ready.

I am asking for those orthotics to keep doing their job so you can run — really run, full-out, after whatever catches your eye next.

I am asking for Yaya — to guide you, to weave your therapy into your learning and your days, and most importantly to love and care for you while your mama is busy building. She is already yours. We are already hers.

I am asking for your sibling — and this is one for much later, baby, not this letter, not any letter for a long while — but there is someone waiting, and I have not stopped working on how to bring them home to you, and I will not stop. You are going to be the best big brother. I cannot wait to watch you show someone smaller how the world works.

And I am asking, above all of it, for one more year of getting to be your mother. Of waking up to someone who requires me to be better, braver, more present than I might otherwise choose to be. I have never done anything harder in my life. I have never done anything that mattered more.

Grow up knowing what I know about you now, Ellison: that the God who drew your wiring knew exactly what He was doing. That you are not broken, not behind, not divergent from anything that matters. You were designed on purpose, by the Great Architect, to land exactly here — in this house, in this family, with a mama who was always going to be the one who could read the blueprint.

The date proves it. July the tenth. It was Nana and Poppa’s anniversary before it became Cooper’s homecoming. It was Cooper’s homecoming before it became your birthday. He signed His name on that date forty-five years before you ever arrived, and when you got here you just walked right in and claimed it — quietly, completely, like you always do — and the rest of us stood there understanding that the plan had been running longer than any of us knew.

You are Neurodivine by Design, my love. Every wire, every fidget, every regulation-through-laughter, every watching-before-doing — all of it, on purpose, by a God who doesn’t make drafting errors.

Happy birthday, Ellison. Year Two was the year I learned who you are.

Year Three is going to be the year you start showing the world.

I am already so proud of you I can barely stand it.

— Mama

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One day something you love is going to leave, and the house is going to go quiet in a way you have never heard before. I am writing this so that when that day comes, you will not be as alone in it as I once was.

I have known two of those silences in my life, and they were not the same.

The first came years before you — the night I lost my first dog, Cooper. I had lived on my own for a whole decade by then, baby. I thought I understood being alone. But that night I learned there is a difference between living alone and being alone, and it is the width of the whole world. My Cooper had always been the heartbeat that answered mine, and when it stopped, the quiet didn’t feel empty. It felt deafening. I cried myself to sleep with nothing to do with my hands but hurt, and every locked-away question I had spent years refusing to look at came unlocked at once. What now? What comes next? Will I always be alone? That last one was the loudest — the one I would never have said out loud.

I need you to know I asked that question into the dark long before you existed. And I need you to know how it finally got answered.

It got answered by you.

The second silence came the day I am writing this, when I let my Bennett go. I had a year to brace for it, so it arrived softer — but that is not the reason I didn’t come apart inside it. The reason was down the hall, breathing the easy breath of a boy who is safe. The reason was you.

And then you did something I will carry until my own last breath. One hour after my Bennett left us, you walked over, reached up, took me by the hand, and led me — you, my little walker who wants to walk everywhere — straight out to the front porch. To two old rocking chairs I had started fixing when I was pregnant with you and never finished, that had sat there half-done and overturned since a storm a couple of weeks ago. You walked me right to them. And I flipped them back upright.

Here is the first thing I need you to understand, son: grief has to go somewhere, or it eats you from the inside out. When my Cooper died I did not know that yet, so I simply drowned. But my Paw Paw Lonnie — your great-grandfather, the man who filled me with music and taught my hands how to make and mend things — had already handed me the secret without my realizing it. When I lost him, I got through it by stripping an old rocking chair down to bare wood and bringing it back to life. The sanding, the rhythm, the vibration of it moved the grief through my body when my heart could not hold it. I had set that tool down for a few years. You put it back in my hand on that porch that blistering hot July afternoon — before I even had the chance to ask myself what comes next… You reminded me that I already knew.

So here is what I want you to have, for when your silence comes.

You will have two tools, and I want you to know how to use both. Move the grief through your body — build something, fix something, walk it out, put your hands to work until the shaking settles. And move the rest of it onto paper — say the thing, write the thing, let the words carry what your hands cannot. That is the whole secret. Fill your hands, and fill a page.

I believe my Cooper and my Bennett are together now — that the God who made us wastes nothing, not one good dog’s finished work, and not one mother’s worst night. The ones who go ahead of us are held. And the love does not stop when they do; it just changes hands. Mine changed into you.

So here is the last thing, and the truest: a silence is only empty when there is no love left in it. There will always be love in yours. I know it, because you took a grieving woman’s hand and filled the loudest silence of her life just by being in the next room. You answered a question I had been crying since before you were born.

You were never a distraction from my grief, my son. You were the proof that it does not get the last word.

I love you with my whole chest — even from wherever I am by the time you read this.

— Mama

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My Ellison,

You are going to love people who do not believe what we believe. People you adore with your whole chest who do not yet know the One who built that chest. I need to teach you how to do that — because it is one of the holiest, hardest, most patient kinds of love there is, and the world will try to teach you to do it wrong. Or worse, they will teach you to turn your back on them.

The world will tell you to argue them into it. To win. To make believing the price of your friendship. Don’t. That is yelling, and yelling has never once led anyone home. God’s love has no conditions, and neither should yours.

Let me tell you about your incredible Auntie.

— ❖ —

You have a Canadian Auntie — “Auntie,” the way they say it up north, not “Ant” like we say down here — who is one of the great loves of my life. She is my soulmate — my person, and I did nothing to earn her. We worked for the same company, in the same department, in two different countries that never should have crossed paths. She answered one of my work emails with a single little emoji, and something in me just said we need to be friends — add her on the book of faces. I did. One last leap of faith was a solo trip via planes, trains and automobiles to a foreign country to knock on this beautiful woman’s front door and pray she wasn’t secretly a serial killer. The rest is history. Spoiler alert — she’s not a serial killer, and we’ve been besties ever since. I have only one explanation for a friendship routed to me through an org chart and an emoji across an international border: only God. He hides His best gifts in the most ordinary places and signs them where, if you’re paying attention, you cannot miss His handwriting.

Your Auntie does not believe the way I do, and that’s ok. She grew up near the church but far from being loved well, and she spent a long time in the arms of people who never learned to hold her the way she deserves to be loved. When you have been loved badly enough for long enough, sometimes a good God can feel like just one more thing waiting to let you down. I get it.

So I did not argue with her when I discovered she is spiritual, not a believer. I never will. For the past seven beautiful years I have just… loved her. Loudly. Consistently. With my whole chest. I answered every call. I have crossed that border many times — and never nearly enough. I showed up the way I wished someone had shown up for her, the whole time.

— ❖ —

And then one chilly summer night at a campground in Canada — and this is the part I want you to hold — she looked at me and asked me the question. How do you love like that? With your whole chest, the way you do?

Now, here is what made her ask it of me, of all people, and you need to understand this part. She was asking a woman who has never once been loved by a man the way the love songs and chick flicks promise. Not once, in my whole life. No great romance (yet). No one who ever chose me back the way I kept choosing them. And still — my chest was full. Overflowing. That is exactly how she knew the love wasn’t coming from a person. A person had never given it to me. It was coming from somewhere else.

So I did not hesitate. I said one word.

Jesus. That’s how.

And then — pay attention, because this is the whole craft of it — I did not preach. I asked her a question back. About what she believed. About what had made it so hard. I turned the light toward her instead of shining it in her eyes. I needed to understand her views and her story. Because testimony is not a sermon you deliver. It is a door you leave open, and a life lived so warm that people get cold standing outside of it.

— ❖ —

Here is the part that took me the longest to learn, and the part I most need you to have:

Her beliefs are hers and hers alone. God designed her with the freedom to find her own way to Him — or not — in her own time. That freedom is not a flaw in the design; it is the design. A love that can’t be refused isn’t love, it’s a leash, and our God does not put leashes on people. So I don’t get to drag your Auntie anywhere. I don’t get to make my love conditional on her arriving. I just get to keep the door open, keep the porch light on, and keep loving her with everything I have for as long as I get the honor of doing so. I did offer her one observation that night, though. I asked her to think about how we became friends. How it transpired that I was sitting in front of her at that very moment. Maybe that was God’s plan all along. He pulled someone all the way from below the Mason-Dixon line to Canada to show her a love that she had always deserved. That is how mighty the God I serve is. He searched the world over to show her that type of love. It came hopping across the border on Christmas night, standing all of five foot one, with open T-Rex arms, in the puffiest coat this Southern girl owned and a big toothy grin. And I left her with that thought.

That is patience. Real patience isn’t waiting for someone to change. It’s loving them completely while they don’t. We can want it for them with all we have, but never ask or require it of them.

So, my boy: love the ones who don’t believe like you. Love them all the way to the floor. Never make them a project. Never make them a debate you’re trying to win. Be so full of the thing you can’t explain that one day, in their own time, they ask you where it comes from. And when they ask — only when they ask — you tell them the truth in as few words as it takes, and then you turn the light right back toward them.

You won’t be loving them into anything. You’ll just be loving them. God can handle the rest. He’s better at it than you will ever be, and He’s been at it a great deal longer.

— ❖ —

And if you’re reading this and you don’t believe the way your mama does — if my faith turned out to be the part of these letters you had to read past — then hear me one more time, gently, with my hand on your shoulder and no grip in it at all: I love you with my whole chest, exactly as you are, exactly where you stand. That was never the price of anything. It never will be. And nobody else’s love is yours to charge for, either.

Keep the porch light on, baby.

— Mama

My Ellison,

I bought a pregnancy journal. I bought you a baby book. Then I bought us a leather-bound Adventure Journal. They are all blank. Two years in, every Baby’s First ___ line is exactly as empty as the day I carried it through the door, and for a while the guilt of that sat on my chest like a stone.

Here’s what I understand now that I didn’t then: I was never going to fill those books — and it has nothing to do with how much I remember. I remember everything. Every detail of you is in here, at full volume, kept like evidence. (At least the important ones — until the room fills up and something slides off a shelf to make space.) My memory was never the problem.

The friction was. To fill one of those books, I would have to find the book, then find a pen, then get the thing written down in the eleven seconds before it slipped out of my hands along with everything else I was carrying. For a brain like mine, that isn’t three small steps — it’s a wall. So the records never landed on those tidy little lines, not because they didn’t exist, but because the lines were the wrong container for me.

Because here is where your babyhood actually lives, my love. Your firsts and your funny little patterns went into the Notes app on my phone — your Aunt Loni warned me from day one to keep them there, bless her, and thank God I listened. The deeper things — the charts, the diagrams, the pattern studies I built trying to understand exactly how your particular nervous system is wired — live on my computer, and there is more of it there than some college research departments keep on an entire subject. And there are somewhere between five and fifty photos and videos of you for every single day you have been alive, all of them on my phone. Maybe two have ever been printed. It’s all there, Ellison. Every bit of it. Just untraditionally — documented to within an inch of its life by a mother whose love was never in question and whose filing system simply refuses to live on paper.

So I stopped apologizing to a stationery aisle. And for the things that mattered most — not the dates and the stats, but the truth of who we were to each other — I reached instead for the one format that has never once frozen me: a blank page, with your name at the top.

— ❖ —

These letters began in a strange and frightening season. My brain had just come roaring back online after twenty years in a fog, and everything it had been holding came out at once — a flood I could not turn off, a fire under everything, an urgency I couldn’t explain, emotions arriving faster than I could name them. I genuinely did not know where any of it was coming from. I only knew that if I didn’t give it somewhere to go, it was going to take me under.

Writing to my family, to explain what I was feeling in a coherent way, is where it started. Writing to you is where it took my breath — and inspired me to write you the most unconventional, uniquely Donna baby book in existence.

The letters did four things at once, which is the only way my brain has ever liked to do anything. They untangled the knot in my head. They gave the flood a structure — banks for the river. They let me practice a craft I was just discovering I had. And they let me say true things, clearly, in a way another person could actually follow, on days when I could barely follow myself. Therapy and craft and record and release, all in a single act — my nervous system’s pressure valve, with your name at the top of every page. You see, if I have a heavy or loud thought and it doesn’t find paper or some other way out, it bounces around my brain like a pinball in an arcade machine.

— ❖ —

So understand what these are, my love.

This is your baby book. It just doesn’t look like anyone else’s, because your mama doesn’t look like anyone else’s. There’s no line in here for your first tooth. There’s something better — the actual shape of the woman who was becoming your mother in real time. The things I was learning the same year you were learning to walk. The love and the faith and the fear and the truth, written down while it was all still wet.

A fill-in-the-blank book would have given you the facts of your babyhood. This gives you the truth of it — who I was, who you were, and exactly how much you were loved, on purpose, by a brain that finally got to work the way it was built to.

You don’t get a typical baby book, Ellison. You get this. And one day, when you’re ready, I think you’ll see that the untraditional, unfinishable, overflowing thing your mama made instead was so much more you — and so much more us — than any line I ever could have left blank. Nothing about our journey was ever meant to be traditional, son. Just perfectly poetic.

Welcome to your life letters.

— Mama

P.S. — And for the parts of you that needed more than a mama’s love to carry, I built you a house, too. A digital one — where every person who helps look after you can finally see the whole of you in one place, instead of scattered across a dozen locked rooms that never talk to each other. But that’s a story for another day, my love.

“The last gift you give the ones you love most is to not look away.”

My Ellison,

By the time you read this, you will already know how to love things. Everybody does — it isn’t rare. What’s rare, and what I want to hand you on purpose the way you hand down a name, is knowing how to love something with your whole chest — all the way to the floor — even when every sensible person in your life is telling you not to.

I learned it from two dogs. I know how that sounds. Stay with me.

Before you, there were your two brothers. Cooper came to me when I was barely more than a girl, before I knew who I was going to be. When I met Cooper I had a clear vision of who I wanted to be. Cooper was there to see that vision derailed and then purposefully pivoted into a new vision. Bennett came along a few months after I lost Cooper, when I was hollowed out and didn’t feel ready for anything. Bennett saw a different shift, even more powerful and magnificent than the first. Both held me while I was lost. People told me not to get Cooper — wrong time, wrong money, too much responsibility, all the reasons careful people give for not opening your heart the whole way. I did it anyway. It was the best no I ever ignored.

So here is the first thing I want you to know about loving with your whole chest: it will almost never arrive at a convenient time, and sometimes logic isn’t the right tool for these types of decisions. I would love to tell you to always follow your wise mama’s advice, but I would be doing you a disservice by setting that hard line, and I love you more than that. Sometimes the people who love you most will try to talk you out of a decision to keep you safe, because they see the logic but cannot see what you feel. Listen to them — and then check your own chest. If the love is real, the timing being wrong has never once made it less real. I have a whole life that proves it. You are part of the proof.

The second thing is harder, and I’m only telling you because you can take it: everything you love with your whole chest, you will someday have to let go. That is not a reason to love less. It is the reason to love all the way. I held Cooper while he left this world, and I learned the entire lesson in that one room. The last gift you give someone you love is to not look away. You stay. You let them fall asleep against you the way they trusted you a thousand times before. Loving with your whole chest means being willing to be in the room for the easy part and the impossible part both. Most people only sign up for the easy part. Be the kind of person who stays.

— ❖ —

There’s a third thing, and it’s the one I didn’t see until you came. I used to think I just had a dangerous amount of love for things that don’t stay. Now I think I was being trained. Cooper taught me how to love like that. Bennett carried me through the hard years I was trying to become your mother — he was on the floor with me on the worst nights, and he was there to greet you the day I finally brought you home. And then one day not long ago, you climbed up and claimed his thousand-dollar leather couch (yes, I have always spoiled my babies), his throne, and that stubborn old man looked at you and simply got up and moved, like he’d been waiting to hand you something. The day you found your own two legs and stood up on your own was the day he knew his work was done. He had been carrying me until you could. He was tired, and he knew he could finally rest. You see, Cooper had given Bennett one mission — take care of our mama, she needs a great man in her life. They both did just that, and on that day, he passed that mission to you, my beautiful blue-eyed baby.

That’s the secret I most want you to have. The love doesn’t end when the one you love is gone. It changes hands. It gets handed forward. I name every one of you after someone I refused to lose, because that is the only kind of forever I have ever believed in — you carry people on by writing them into someone new. None of it was an accident. Mama is intentional. Always. All of it was love refusing to stop existing just because a body did.

— ❖ —

Here is the part that still stops my breath. Cooper found me on July the tenth — and I brought him home against every no in the room, not knowing the day already belonged to someone. July the tenth is the day your Poppa and Nana were married. I took the date that was theirs and gave it to the son they told me not to love. And then, twenty years later to the very day, you were born. The same date. The day I was told not to claim became your birthday, my love — one date holding my first son, my third son, and the marriage that began our whole line. Tell me that was an accident. That one isn’t me being intentional — that one is God, signing His name on a date where I could not miss it.

— ❖ —

So here is what I am teaching you, my whole-chested boy. Love at the wrong time. Love against the sensible no. Love so hard it hurts. Love things that can’t stay, and love them all the way to the floor anyway. Stay in the room for the hard part. And when something you love finishes, don’t go looking for where it went — feel for where it landed.

It landed in you. It always lands in you.

You were always going to be loved like this. I learned how long before you ever got here. The world doesn’t have to be ready for a love that big.

You will be.

— Mama