Do you believe in luck (good or bad)? If so, do you think a higher power is pulling strings on your behalf — or working against you? How much control do you have over your life? When the rain falls do you take that as a sign that a rainbow is coming? Or do you take it as the world warning you of something? When you accomplish something new are you lucky or did you work hard? Is all luck good? Or a mix? Black and white? Or maybe it is a shade of gray that changes along with you. I believe that things happen, whether that ties into luck is a different story for me.
On the day of my birth things were rolling that made my family question if i was lucky or unlucky but strong enough to overcome.
My parents immigrated from Liberia because of a civil war that took many lives. Are they lucky to be alive? Are they lucky to have been able to come to America— fleeing their country? Or maybe they are unlucky that it even had to happen. That lives were being lost for something they weren’t a part of.
The woman who raised my mother died about a month or two before I came into the world. The woman who raised her when her parents couldn’t, the woman who looked after her children. The woman that I would eventually be named after. Was it a sign that I would come into this world with a bang? Or was it something else, laying the path for my life?
My mom went into a routine checkup while 8 months pregnant with me. They said my heart wasn’t beating or that they couldn’t read my heart. My mother was put into labor to get me out. Was it luck they caught it? Or were the doctors good at their job?
When my mom gave me my name did she think about the meaning? Did she look at everything that happened and the ones that shouldn’t have happened? Did she think about the lives lost and the ones gained? Did she realize that she had the first child out of all of her family to be born a United States citizen? Did she realize all the strings that were pulled and the ones that were cut to create the delicate story of my birth?