I am one in five million.

One in five million children born to mothers who were told that the probability of conception was five percent, or ten percent, or twenty percent, or any other number too small to have hope nestled within
it. A number too small to accept without a second opinion.

I am one in five million who were coaxed into being with second opinions and hormone injections and countless blood samples. My father was the man who learned how to give those injections. To learn how, he stabbed an orange. My ­father stabbed an orange, puncture after puncture, and learned how to make them swift and direct. Puncture after puncture, and juice would well up in the holes and spill out. My father would avoid imagining how blood would well up in the holes and spill out when it was my mother's thigh and not the orange. My father would avoid imagining the grinding of gears within her as natural cycles were brought to a halt. The cycle of injections and waiting and pain and embraces and exam rooms rolled onward. These were not the first injections; it was not the final pain.

I am one in five million who arrived to bring the final pain, but also the first embrace. One in five ­million who arrived by C-section, jaundiced, feet first, choking on an umbilical cord, underweight, hairless, or premature, and yet still survived to scream at the world and bring change to the lives of people whose lives had been changed so much already.

I arrived prematurely, at five pounds, seven ounces. Five pounds and seven ounces that fit in the palm of my father's hand and curled up, swaddled, in my mother's arms. My mother's arms were so frail and white when I appeared. Her skin was so white and her eyes bloodshot and she looked nearly dead, said everyone who saw her. She was nearly dead, but walked fearlessly to the elevator that would bring her to where her baby lay under ultraviolets, having been born yellow. She walked fearlessly for a woman whose soul had broken when she was told that her body was broken.

My arrival was one in five million forgivenesses for the ones whose bodies were broken. I was the forgiveness and the embrace that said it was all right when my mother had to tell the person that she loved that she was sorry, that she could not do what people are supposed to do when they love each other.

I am one in five million proofs that two people's love can be enough to make life.