To say that Lydia was born when I was least prepared to have a baby is something of an understatement. Though I was in my early twenties and had recently graduated from college, I felt then and feel now that I was way too young to be someone’s mother. I was unemployed and lived in an absolute hovel of an apartment on the wrong side of the tracks with a guy I had been working up the courage to end things with before I found out I was pregnant. Having grown up with an absentee dad myself, I didn’t want the same thing for my child and I decided to try to make the relationship work.

It didn’t work.

The guy was a nightmare and the relationship was a nightmare and my life with him was a three-year-long nightmare that I wish I’d spared myself. I finally kicked him out for good when Lydia was just over two years old, and I officially set out on the path of single motherhood.

In those early years of Lydia’s baby- and toddler-hood, I had a great deal of guilt about the inauspicious start in life that I’d given her. I agonized over everything: the man I’d picked to be her father, the fact that I’d had to go to work full-time when she was only eight weeks old, the constant emotional turmoil and uncertainty of our lives before the break-up, her having to go to daycare after the break-up, the struggles over money and stability, my impatience and poor coping skills, and on and on and on.

Though I was doing the best I knew how, I couldn’t shake the feeling that my best was nowhere near good enough, and it gnawed at me day and night. She deserved so much better than I was giving her.

One evening when she was three or four, I was sitting at the computer while she was playing in the other room. She came in to me, as she often did, and launched into one of the stories she was so fond of telling. But this one was different.

She said that before she was born she was in a different place and that she had had to look for a mother. She looked and looked, she told me, trying to find just the right mother, and when she saw me she knew that I would be the best mother and she picked me. She said that my mom was there to help her and together they knew that she had made the right choice. She was so matter-of-fact as she recounted the story that I couldn’t help but believe her.

It was, and I expect it will always be, the single best thing that anyone has ever said to me.