The Bigger They Get

Dear Son Two,

Thank you for your patience this week.  This letter is late and I’m ashamed of myself.  Not because I got drunk at the pig roast on Saturday (turns out I didn’t) but because I should have written this last Sunday.  Instead I spent the day visiting Scarlett and Rhett at Tara and listening to Scarlett rave about the funeral she went to last week.  The BEST music.  The MOST BEAUTIFUL flowers.  The TASTIEST lunch.  Promise me that when I start viewing funerals as exciting social occasions you will smother me with my pillow.

Then I should have gotten to it Monday, but a good friend’s dear child was experiencing a meltdown and I was needed there.

Then there was Tuesday and I too much work to catch up on from Monday.

And then on Wednesday we were ALL busy helping said friend’s child and wreaking the havoc that shall not be spoken of here.  You know what I’m talking about.  Wednesday evening I came down with the Black Death and Thursday was a blur of misery.  Now here it is Friday and you have been 20 for six days already.

Just because I didn’t write your letter doesn’t mean I didn’t spend any time on your birthday reminiscing about the day you joined our family.  The details might be a little hazy to you, but I remember them clearly.  You, sweet child, are our favorite souvenir from our two + years in New Hampshire, even if you were born three weeks late during the hottest summer on record.  We did nothing but play Scrabble for those last three weeks.  I have always been a sore loser and not a particularly good winner and I was fat and grumpy and hormonal and it took Dad 15 years to agree to play Scrabble with me again. Heh.

When my water finally broke, it was Labor Day.  I should have guessed that would happen.

You were my easiest labor and delivery and an absolutely beautiful newborn.  The time we spent in the hospital would have been perfect if we hadn’t gotten the roommate from hell.  She was loud and whiny and had a grating, nasal voice that made me want to stab myself with a fork.  She kept going on and on about how beautiful you were and how ugly her baby was in comparison.  I found her disloyalty shocking and infuriating.  How could she say such a thing about her own newborn child?

And then she showed me her baby.

Oh. My. God.  The poor child was proof that Sasquatch exists and can successfully mate with homo sapiens.  I think I mumbled something about how cute his fingers were.  I was polite enough not to mention his tail or his unibrow.

You were gorgeous, but you didn’t make him look bad, believe me.  He did that all by himself.

When we brought you home, you proved to be the kind of baby sleep deprived moms of cranky babies accuse other new mothers of lying about.  You slept through the night on your first night at home and every night thereafter (except for some nights during your teen years when I innocently thought you were sleeping but you apparently weren’t home.  I’m not quite ready to laugh about those yet, so wait a few more years before bringing that up at the Thanksgiving table, okay? )

When you turned three and began experiencing chronic – ah – digestive upsets, we were scared to death.  The doctors tested you for all kinds of horrible scary things and we had to wait days and sometimes weeks for the results.  This went on for over a year before you began experiencing migraine headaches and it occurred to the doctors that you’d been experiencing abdominal migraines all that time.  On the one hand we were incredibly relieved to find out that the problem wasn’t life threatening.  On the other, those damn chronic migraines colored your entire childhood, affected your school experience and social development, and made your life so difficult that we despaired.

You, however, knew nothing different.  As painful and bumpy as your life was, your experience with chronic illness helped shaped you into the sweet, compassionate man whom we are SO PROUD of and love so deeply.

Of our three children, you are the one who seems to have been gifted with the most massive quantities of your dad’s redneck genes; you are the NASCAR fan, the one whose political views I sometimes find shocking.  But you are a thinker and your arguments are informed and reasoned and your knowledge of so many topics is broad and often surprising.  Sometimes I fear your views of the world and certain issues in particular are too bleak and too black and white, so the other day when you told me you thought you might actually vote for Obama after all because you see more hope and optimism coming from his campaign I was thrilled.  Not necessarily because you’d vote for Obama (although I’m still doing a happy dance) but because I take that as a sign that your world view continues to mature and deepen.  You are already AMAZING and getting more amazing all the time.

You are an incredibly talented photographer.  I hope you find a way to make photography your life’s work if that’s what you want.  I see how passionate you are about it and how happy it makes you and I wish for you to always be that passionate and happy about many things in your life.  Except maybe the Death Metal and the mosh pits.  Oh, and the Urban Exploring.  It’s risky.  You could get hurt.  Or arrested.

I know, I know.  You’re saying, Stop being a mom.

Sorry, pal.  No can do.

Happy, happy 20th birthday, sweetheart.  I love you.

Mom

This entry was posted on Friday, September 12th, 2008 at 6:04 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.