Today I am celebrating my sweet 16.
It is the sixteenth anniversary of my hysterectomy at age 27. This surgery purged any remaining cells of cervical cancer from my young body but with it removed my womb. To save my life, I would no longer be able to give life to another human being. I had agonized over the decision. I had so desperately wanted to give birth to one more child. While I was strong and brave through the roller coaster ride of a sudden cancer diagnosis and various treatment options, the journey afterward would be more challenging. The grief of having no more children was the toughest wound to heal. Thankfully I was already blessed with a loving supportive family, a strong caring husband and one beautiful, wise little two and a half year old. It was my daughter’s light, love and sage bits of wisdom that would transform me over the year that followed and lead me through my healing.
Profound wounds truly are our openings to the light that shines within us. 
If we allow ourselves to feel our way through, we journey through them to a core gift buried there for each of us. Through that healing, we discover the divine beings that we are while inhabiting these amazing human bodies and living these remarkable lives.
That is a story I am ready to tell. I will take precious time to do it and hopefully to tell it well. I have shared it with those closest to me. Now, I plan to share it more expansively in the next few years, along with sharing other stories of love and wisdom that I’ve been blessed with on my journey. I pray that when I give birth to these creations that they find hearts to hold them well.
I create now from a womb more expansive than this human body could hold and with a Love I couldn’t have known sixteen years ago. That was, and is, the gift of my wound.
Today I acknowledge this precious anniversary for the very first time without my child here at home. While we two have shared many heroine journeys together, my daughter now flies solo as a brand new college student. She has embarked on the next chapter of her own heroine’s journey alone, knowing that her family is always there for her ~ as we have always been for one another. I am so tremendously proud of her and of who she is in this world.
I am so blessed to be alive, to be with those in my life and to have this one child. We have all taught and learned so much from one another…. And to think, the journey continues… for us all.
DeAnne Wolfgram 