The Very Special Mother's Day Gift

My day started with a phone call from my daughter, who is vacationing somewhere in Arizona. And it ended with a dinner with my own mother, who lives in a senior’s facility in White Rock. Both events were special and filled my heart with love. Those mother-daughter connections are a gift indeed.

But it was on my way home from White Rock that I received a gift from another mama, an unexpected gift at an unexpected moment.

As I travelled along 16th Avenue, I was enjoying the fields of newborn animals – lambs and kids and foal. All of a sudden I noticed something didn’t look right with a horse standing in a field among other horses. I could see her back legs were stained pinkish-red, and there was something dragging alongside her tail. Thinking she might have been injured on the barbed wire fence, I quickly pulled over, jumped out of the car, and ran over to the fence for a better look.

It was then that I realized the “something dragging” was the remains of an amniotic sac and afterbirth. And as I watched, a little mound of new life, a tiny chestnut brown and white foal still wet with amniotic fluid, struggled to his feet and took his very first steps. He staggered to within a few feet of where I stood, looking at me with clear brown eyes and scrunching up his sweet, soft nose. Strangely, the mare was paying her new babe no attention at all - she was quietly chomping the green grass in the field.

There was no house in sight, so I jumped back in the car and drove to the first farmhouse that came into view. Fortunately there was someone home, and they were the owners of the horses in the fields. I let them know that their mare had just given birth and was still dragging the afterbirth, and watched as they ran across the fields to take care of the new mama and babe.

I wanted to return to the field with them for another look at this precious new life, but I knew my own crew would be impatiently waiting for their mama to get home and feed them dinner, and so I continued on my way, smiling all the while from the gift I had just received, the gift of seeing a new life begin.

Welcome to the world, little foal. May you live a long, safe, and well-loved life.