Mine all Mine

While I was waiting to go into the delivery room to give birth to my daughter I shared a room with a teenage mom to be.  She was very young, alone and terrified.  No one had come to see her all day.  When my husband left to get some lunch I finally had a chance to talk to her.  She said her name was Marie but didn’t say anything else about her personal life.  I asked if someone was coming to be with her when the baby was born but she said no.

When my husband returned he said that he had picked up the pictures at the drug store while he was out.  I was very excited because they were from a roll of film that I found in my drawer and I didn’t know how old they were or even where they were taken.  It was a fun surprise to see pictures of my first apartment and my little cat Mina.  My husband asked why I named the cat Mina and I told him that roughly translated from Polish t it meant “mine”.   She was the very first cat that I had owned by myself and she traveled all over the west with me.   I told him that it was nice to have someone to love, even if it was a cat, during a very lonely time in my life.  He laughed and said that he was happy to replace the cat.

Marie and I actually had our daughters at almost the same time, the middle of the night.  We ended up near each other in recovery and between drifting off to sleep and the excitement of first pictures the nurse came around to ask if we had already chosen names. I told her the name that my husband and I had picked out.  When it was Marie’s turn she looked at me and smiled and turned to the nurse and said that her daughter’s name was Mina Marie.