8:40 a.m. For some folks, finding the perfect card is an important task. A quest. People (ok -- my mother) have told me that they've slaved over a hot display for hours looking for just the right card to say just the right words to express exactly what's in the heart. Sometimes I get cards with words underlined or phrases crossed out. With exclamation points added!

If you consider yourself a writer, it's galling, indeed, to be forced to find the "right" card containing all the "right" words. Even if you stand there until the store is closing and the clerks are flicking the fluorescents, you'll never find those particular words.

When my daughter was born, I saved all the cards people sent to her and pasted them into a scrapbook. I was imitating my own mother who, just twenty years earlier, had done the same thing for me. When I was growing up, I liked looking through this record of my earliest existence, opening the sugar ration book, looking at the directions for assembling a velocipede, reading all the cards.

When my daughter was born, I was prepared. Almost. I'd filled a jar with cotton balls. The crib was painted bright yellow and white and I'd made a wall-hanging in bright garish colors to catch the morning light. There was a rocking chair and a mobile that played music. It was a near-perfect setting and the only thing I still had to finish was the most fabulous bathrobe in the world. I thought, somehow, if I could wrap myself up in the perfect garment, everything would be fine.

As luck would have it, I tend to put things off sometimes. My due date was still two weeks away and I was working on the pink-flowered lining of the robe when I went into labor. Now, I'm a pretty fast stitcher and I had a state-of-the-art Singer, but there was still miles of trim to add and seams to pink and hems to turn.

It was an extremely long labor and I almost got the thing finished. I had time to eat four hot dogs and baste in the arms and iron the facings while the military sent a helicopter out into the Colorado mountains to retrieve the daddy-to-be from his war maneuvers. Eventually, I packed the pinned-together, unfinished pile of fabric into my overnight bag and we all raced to the hospital.

When my daughter was born, she actually weighed less than the robe. I'd miscalculated a few things. The lining was too thick, for one thing. And her teeny tiny fingers, all curled like a rose, all moist. Who warns you?

Nobody can warn you. Nobody can tell a twenty-year-old person anything. Oh, my mother tried. She told me to make sure the baby was wrapped up tight because babies didn't like to feel their feet dangling loose when they're first born. Also, she sent me white cotton belly-bands with long wrap-around ties so the little bellybutton would be perfectly formed. Is it? I think it is.

I think everything turned out perfectly, in fact. It probably always does, even for a twenty-year-old with an unfinished sewing project and a mother on the other side of the world.

Somehow, we all managed to survive. The baby slept through the night. The war spared her father. Her feet didn't dangle all that much and eventually, I ripped apart the heavy, confining robe and used pieces of it to make a quilt for her bed. When I tried to punish her by sending her to her room, I'd often find her sitting in the middle of the bed, tracing around the colored squares with her fingers. Pink, rosy ... and she'd always look up and smile.

When my daughter was born, I knew, down deep, that I would never be prepared, and I was right about that. There aren't enough stitches in time nor words in the English language. All you can do is hold onto each other and hope for the best.

When my daughter was born, thirty-two years ago today, she performed a small miracle for her very first act: she looked up at me and she turned me into a mother.