in her blue eyes

"She's a beautiful baby!"  I don't go out often with Eleni, but when I do I often hear that phrase.  There's never been a point when a person couldn't tell just by looking that there is something wrong with my baby.  They look a little longer, pause, wonder and say the only nice thing they can say, "She's a beautiful baby."

It's her eyes that give her away.  

She has beautiful blue eyes.  Miracle eyes.  Eyes I always wished upon a star for my child, more than half knowing it could not be.  I have brown eyes.  Well, brownish-green now that I'm grown up.  We all had dark brown eyes as kids, as does my dad, all my nephews, nieces and my first two children too.  When I married Brandon they showed a slideshow of our growing up and I reveled at his shining blond hair and clear blue eyes.  My grandmother's eyes were blue.  There was a chance, after all.

When Eleni came into the world so tragically, she did not show us her eyes.  We didn't know their color until she opened them a week later.  And there they were, a dark steel blue, like Aria's when she was born.  Like Daddy's.

Everyone assumed they would turn, as Aria's did, around 4 or 5 months, but I wondered.  I wondered because she had a sprinkling of blond hairs.  I wondered because it would be just so wrong for God to give me a blue eyed baby - - - like this.

I had been wishing for the wrong miracle, but now I know.  I know what a mother should wish for.

I have never been one of those women who just wishes for a healthy baby.  Oh, no.  I wanted a GIRL.  And quietly, absurdly, I wanted a girl with blue eyes.  I kept wanting that during months of trying to conceive, as we questioned whether surgery had made conception even possible, even after miscarriages- still wanting a girl.

After Eleni was born, in those early days and weeks going home every night without our baby, my husband and I would let the words and the tears come after Aria and Liam went to bed.  I would sob, "I don't get to have a baby.  She's not what I wanted."  And then from the depths of my soul, "She's exactly what I wanted, but horribly, horribly injured.  And it's not her fault.  She's still the baby I wanted."

Eleni is six months old.  Her eyes haven't changed one bit.  If anything the centers are just a fraction clearer and paler than before.  I would give back anything, anything to make her whole again.  I would trade blue eyes in an instant.  But that's not the way it works.  There is no bargaining.

Today, in her blue eyes, I still see a pang of sorrow.  Hers and mine.  I also see the beauty that others see.  And the injury too, her sightless disorientation.  It's all there.

She's a beautiful baby.  Yes, she is.