“What was my first word? Who was there when I was born? When did I start to walk? Which toys did I play with? What made me cry when I was a baby?”
 
My oldest has reached the age where she has started to ask questions like this. As she grows up, she is realizing that, in order to understand the world around her, she must first understand herself. This makes her insatiably curious about her own identity, her history — her “origin story,” as they say in the movies.
 
I’ve got most of it documented either in writing or in photos, but even if it’s a detail that wasn’t scribbled in a baby book or saved to my digital cloud, it’s a memory that I can quickly summon and make real for her as we snuggle and talk about who she was, who she is, and who she may become.
 
I’m the mum. I have kept all of these things in my heart.
 
The Blessed Mother knew more about God before opening a book than most of us could discover after a lifetime of study and prayer. There is no one whose knowledge of Christ was so intimate, so deep, so simultaneously ordinary and extraordinary, as the human woman who bore him, birthed him, nursed him, raised him and eventually gave him up.
 
In the way that I can tell my daughter everything there is to know about the part of her life she cannot recall, Mary can tell us everything we need to know about Christ. All we have to do is ask.
 
Mary kept all of these things in her heart. — Luke 2:19