3/4/18 | Today you turned thirteen years old.

For the second year in a row, you have strep throat on your birthday, so it is fortunate I didn’t plan that big party I have imagined but never held. You lack the ability to tell time, to know what a minute, an hour, a day, a year is, and so I am able to squirm off the hook. A few days ago, while you played in the bathtub with your cars and toy bears, I whispered to your dad about how I’m disappointed in myself, how I let my own ambivalence about your birthday prevent me from providing you with a birthday event you would delight in–trampolines, bowling, maybe visiting dogs at the Humane Society–, because you never realize what you are missing. Some days I think I should not be forgiven for the ways I skirt around motherhood like it is a fire I cannot get too close to for fear of getting burned. I am sorry that I cannot fake it better, even for you.

I thought yesterday that maybe we should just stop celebrating your birthday altogether. What a relief that would be. I wandered around the toy store looking for gifts to buy you, and keenly felt the pointlessness of my effort. Aisle after aisle, there is nothing left for me to buy. We own all of the toys for babies or toddlers that might interest you, and everything else is, well, not for babies or toddlers, especially one who is 90lbs and nearly as tall as my shoulder. I bought some foam blocks to add to our collection because Legos frustrate you and anyway you cannot imagine the castles or spaceships you might build, that might spirit you away. I bought a dog-shaped sprinkler for when the weather gets hot again, because you still love water as intensely as when you were a baby. There is also a Thomas & Friends train track. We will wrap your presents and you will thrill at the unknown even if you barely pay each gift itself a second thought after opening.

On my drive home from the store, a fragment of what I thought was a poem flitted through my mind: “…I put away childish things….” I thought perhaps it was Kipling, but a quick online search and I was reminded the line comes from First Corinthians, the Bible’s chapter on love.

11 | When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child. I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things. 12 | For now we see in a mirror, darkly, but then face to face. Now I know in part, but then I shall know just as I also am known.

You won’t have that opportunity, I suppose, to transition into a man. You’ve just barely become a child. At six feet you may be six, if we are lucky. I don’t know what constitutes a teenager, an adult: is it merely years on the earth? Must we also have our years and our body and our mind in sync as well? Who would have thought, thirteen years ago that this would be our reality. I feared, but I couldn’t have known. I’ve stopped trying to predict our misery; and yet, holidays release a predictable, yet still relentless, wave of depression that subsumes me before I can anticipate its arrival. Even as I know that birthdays don’t change anything. Yesterday and tomorrow, we are the same.

When you turned one year old, I wrote to you in a journal I once thought you might read: “I am so ambivalent. You are not what I expected and yet you are everything. In many ways, you are as puzzling to me as you were the day you were born and yet I know you as well I know my own body.” In thirteen years, those words are as true and as bittersweet as when I wrote them. It seems that as you grow, the mirror will remain dark, and I will still only ever have a partial understanding, a glimpse, of who I am and who you are to be.

In the coming years, whether we count their passing as worthy of celebration or no, our little family will stumble along with our good intentions in the lead, hoping to get this one life right at least part of the time. Enough will have to be enough. I can forgive myself for not yet telling you it is your birthday this morning, for not throwing you a party, for not knowing how to raise you all of the days in between the years. The rules became inapplicable to us so long ago. And I can accept, because I have to, because I’ve learned I have to, that I cannot guarantee you a safe place in this world. Age will not bring you independence, but I will joyfully keep you by my side as long as I am alive to hold your hand in mine.

Perhaps every year, I should be celebrating my birth day on yours. Your birth, your life, has sculpted me in ways I innocently, naively, could never have imagined. I dreamed of castles, an idyll, but was rewarded with something more elementary. I was reinvented at your birth. And now, after thirteen years of growth, I can say with certainty I need never have worried as I did then that I wouldn’t love you. Or as the seizures came, as the disappointments came, that I couldn’t love you. If there is one star that shines brightly, inextinguishable, in the dark and fathomless sky of our future, it is love.