After trying for more than two years to conceive Sawyer, my body seemed to have figured out how to be pregnant; in October of 2000, just weeks after starting a new position with Stanford’s incoming president, John Hennessy, I got pregnant again without even trying. I wouldn’t discover I was pregnant until severe morning sickness began to consume me in December. My daughter, Avery, was born in 2001, six weeks before 9/11.
When we brought Avery home from the hospital, Sawyer—just shy of two years and two months old—looked over at me and said, “For ages, and ages, and ages, and ages I’ve wanted a baby sister.” He bonded with her from the start and she received and returned that love like a reflex. Sixteen years later, they are bonded still.
Having grown up lonely as the only child of my parents, the only young child in an extended family of much older half siblings, the only child on this strange interracial island, witnessing an unyielding bond between my children gives me such hope that if all else fails they will have each other.