choosing your child's middle name
issue 51 ♡ the rain fell to make the rose grow and when the rain stops the sunray will come
dear doris/mama. shall we call her rafa rose or rafa rain? love kawa leaf
dearest readers,
it’s my daughters 8th birthday today :)
before she was born, her big (angel) sister kawa and i were discussing her middle name. we couldn’t decide between rose or rain. so we agreed to leave it up to the weather gods and if it were to be a sunny day when she she arrived — then rafa rose she would be. if it were a rainy day — then rafa rain it was. the odds were pretty even in the midst of a sydney autumn.
i was almost two weeks overdue with her, before she was born just after lunchtime on the sunniest day overlooking mona vale beach. big sister kawa came to meet her for the first time a couple hours later — to meet her mui-mui (little sister in cantonese) as we nicknamed her while she was in-utero.
a little over a year later, big sister kawa passed away and our mui-mui was no longer a mui-mui — the little sister. she entered a terribly unique situation of becoming an only (evident) child. for a couple years she lived in this strange sibling space of being an in-between — not the eldest, not the youngest, not quite the only child. the playground protection of her fierce big sister had been ripped away. there was no big sis to speak for her, no big sister to shelter her from the storm. she would be forced to find her own feet, inner courage and voice within the big wide world.
it was during these seasons of estrangement, she told us at the ripe old age of two and a half, that she no longer wanted to be mui-mui — a self acknowledgement that she was no longer anyone’s younger sister and perhaps intuitively a knowing that she was gingerly pacing towards big sister shoes, rendering the nickname obsolete.
we were warned when kawa passed, that our marriage would most possibly fail. statistics showed that couples who lost a child — more often than not — broke up and broke-down in the midst of unflinching grief. however in the rare cases where parents stayed together, it was due to a living child who would bind, bond and bolt-hole their family together.
the rain fell to make the rose grow — and when the rain stops — the sunray will come.
happy birthday to my darling rafa rose — my second-born who has lived a young life most should not endure but has done so with much grace and a heart so expansive that she has enveloped her mama & dad(a) into an eternal and epic embrace.
big love,
mama d xx
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