Three

My dearest Pants,

One of my oldest friends in the world just became a dad, and I’ve gotten some pretty good emails from him over the last few days.  One of them (“he’ll only sleep on us what do we do how long does this last?!”) took me  back, in an instant, to the first few days and weeks after you were born.   YOU were the same way, except you would only sleep on your mom, and only with your head wedged up right up under my neck.  I was sore and tired and covered in breast milk but I was just coherent enough to realize that I needed to try with all my might to preserve every second of your beginnings, that it would fly right by, and as you scootched your tiny little head right up into my neck, I’d hold onto you with my hands and with my heart and my head I’d think, as hard as I possibly could:  “Remember this.  Remember this.  Remember this.”

And still.  As hard as I tried to wrap that moment up into forever, one second, you were tiny, and the next minute, you were a boy.

It’s funny how things work sometime.  Because I have to admit something to you, and that is that I’ve always been terrified of living an ordinary life.  I worried what a mortgage and the suburbs and two point five kids would look like to other people.  The seventeen year old idealist stuck in my head felt like everyone would know I’d sold out, and the Carrie Bradshaw character that shares the other half of my head felt so disappointed that life hadn’t yet delivered me a closet just for my shoe collection.

And in the same breath I’d worry about ordinary, I was always quick to dismiss anyone who described babies as miraculous.  I’d argue that to assign divinity to something so universal was to rob us, all of us, of our humanity, of what makes us truly great.  It wasn’t that I considered the slog of dirty diapers and Sesame Street to be too crappy to ever be considered something special, just that I thought that what makes us special isn’t something someone on high grants us, but just who we are.  To cast childhood as some sort of magical realm seemed like overkill, like missing the point.

But this year something in me changed as I watched you become a person, as you turned into someone I just could not be more crazy about.

Don’t get me wrong.  We are absolutely wrapped in ordinary.  We’re about as average and boring as a tiny family can get, but it doesn’t matter to me at all.  I could care less what other people think. To me, smack dab in the middle of this ordinary world, you are nothing less than extraordinary.  That I got YOU honestly and truly seems nothing short of miraculous.  Things as simple as your eyelashes along the curve of your cheek, your knobby knees, your big blue eyes, these things astonish me a hundred times a day.

You are endlessly fascinating to me.  I could watch the time lapse movie of your little face every day for the rest of my life.  And it doesn’t matter to me that pretty much only one other person on the planet feels that with me.  It is as true for me as the ocean or the tides or the sun in the sky.

I think we know how pathetic we are, but we do it anyway – at night your father and and I lie next to each other before we fall asleep and we whisper to each other all things you’ve done that day, the funny stuff you say, the thousands of ways you’ve astonished us, the stuff we most don’t want to forget.  How you love worms and birds and walks, how you’ll walk out the front door and exclaim “What a bootiful day!”, how you won’t eat french fries but you devour whole cucumbers.  We think it’s amazing that your best friend is a stuffed turtle and that you love the freeway overpass and that you say “Heck yes!” whenever we ask you if you want some melon and that your favorite thing to do in the entire world is to park cars.  And we know that we’re goofy and that everyone else feels just like this about their own children and that no one else thinks these stories are interesting and yet, that just doesn’t matter at all.

The other day you and I were dancing in the living room and you were showing me how to do the robot to Fleetwood Mac and sun was streaming in through the window and I’ve never paid attention to any Fleetwood Mac lyrics before in my life, but somehow these caught me at just the right moment:

I never did believe in miracles,
But I’ve a feeling it’s time to try.
I never did believe in the ways of magic,
But I’m beginning to wonder why.

And I have to tell that when you curl up next to me at the end of the day and in your high squeaky voice you say “I want ta cuddle” and then you snuggle up next to me and whisper “Mama, I love you SO MUCH”, I believe in it all.  In miracles and magic and true love and the absolute wonderfulness of you.  And I’ll never stop believing.

I love you Pants. SO MUCH.  Happy Birthday, you crazy car parker you.