Birthdays

August is a month of birthdays in our household. There are sons and daughters and nieces and nephews and cousins and friends and relations all who have birthdays this month. So we leap from birthday to birthday with barely a day in between sometimes. In many ways it is a lot of fun and I have learned to begin gift buying months in advance or the budget gets a little strained.

But as I have gotten older some sadness has crept in.

Today for instance is my Dad's birthday. He and I had a tricky relationship so sometimes I am ambivalent about him but today I simply miss his hearty enjoyment of the celebration of his birthday. He was a big noisy man who loved to party and it is very strange to be still and quiet this evening. He and I were so close in so many ways and in recent years my mother allowed me to cook his birthday dinner. I am thinking this evening that we would have been at the planning of the menu for weeks. He would have changed his mind a dozen times and oh we would have laughed our way through the process of choosing a menu. A path that lay between what I could cook for however many were invited and what he wanted.

This month I am also looking forward to Vetboy's twenty first birthday on the 19th. Again it is a day that is a little strained and has been since his younger sister was stillborn on the same day when he was two. Always I wonder on this day, what would she have been like? Would she be a tomboy or a girlie girl (in which case she surely would have picked the wrong mother)? Would she have liked books or horses or dancing? Yet I have a living, breathing son who equally deserves to have this day celebrated. Sometimes it is very hard to deal with the joy and the grief all together.

Other birthdays are mercifully easier and simpler.

So here's to the birthday boys and girls. Have a very good year all of you.

Small Boy isn't small any more

Robin at Metanoia writes of being astonished at her son's births and made me think of my own astonishment that my own Small Boy was seventeen yesterday, and is no longer a small boy. I shall have to find a new name for him. Mostly I think that as a parent I am astonished at how fast and how thoroughly my sons have grown up, and I marvel at the change from helpless dependence to striding independence.

But none of this normal, natural growing up is what astonished me about Small Boy.

He was born some nine weeks early and I think the first time I was truly astonished by him was when we celebrated his first birthday. Up till then I think each day had been such a struggle to keep him alive that I had ceased to think about his first birthday or any other birthday. That first year was spent in hospitals and doctors rooms and blood labs and imaging centres and his survival was by no means certain. I didn't think of that though, each day was an effort dedicated to keeping him alive.

Like many premies he grew out of his difficulties and by his fourth year of school spent almost all term there. In time he grew into a fine dedicated sportsman, passionate about rugby in particular. When he went to High School it was hard to beleive that he had ever been ill. He was undoubtedly a jock.

Then he was involved in an horrific rugby accident in a match twenty two months ago and suddenly we were in a hospital waiting anxiously as doctors worked to keep him alive and prevent the swelling spinal cord from further damage that would result in permanent paralysis. This too he finally overcame and is once more fit and rushing about sports fields. Tragically never again as a player. The recovery has been long and hard and involved the loss of dreams that many of us do not experience until we are much older, and often not in so brutal a fashion.

Remembering his frightening panicky (on my part) sudden birth I am astonished that he has reached seventeen at all. I never dared to dream about his birthdays, taking each one as a gift.

Today I am delighted by his survival and courage and strength and honesty.