I talked with Munchkin on the phone earlier this week. It was an early morning before she went off to her first day of school for the year. I don’t know if she was tired and had a sleepy voice. Or the beginnings of a cold. Or what it was. But her voice was different.

Maybe I’m overly sensitive to changes as I haven’t seen her in over a year. Maybe her voice hasn’t changed at all and my memory is already starting to warp things that I never wanted to forget. But it struck me.

“This is the voice of my daughter. And I don’t know it.”

I wouldn’t have known it in a room of crowded people. If I was blinded, I wouldn’t have picked it out. And I’ve been mulling that fact over in my head a lot this past week. It’s just a weird thing, as a birth mother, to realize that changes are going to happen and some of those things are going to make me unable to initially recognize my daughter.

It’s a good thing she has my eyes.