If you have one, you were carried.
If you have one, you were worth going back for.
And you are not alone anymore. You never really were. We just lost each other for a while.”
Last month — one year after the day a nurse saw a tattoo and walked out to call for help — we held the first Cornflower reunion.
Forty-some people, from four countries.
Some carriers, ancient now, in wheelchairs. Some saved children, gray-haired, holding photographs of the families who raised them and the birth families they’ll never know.
And all of them, every single one, with a small faded blue flower on the inside of their wrist.
My mother stood up to speak, and the room went quiet, and I watched my quiet, ordinary mother — who was never quiet, and never ordinary, I just hadn’t known — look out at a room full of the living proof of what she’d done.
