Happy Birthing Day
Today is D.’s ninth birthday. His last (as a good friend pointed out) single digit birthday. Nine years ago minus a few hours, I was working pretty damn hard to bring this kid into the world — because he was having none of it. (No, really, I’m quite happy here in this nice dark warm placental sea. I see no reason to move.) By now, Ed was driving a surreally exhausted me and completely stunned baby home from the hospital. We had signed ourselves out rather than stay the night on the ward which in retrospect might not have been a great idea but didn’t make any material difference. And thus D. was born (minus several million details).
The first thing I think of, when I wake up on either 28 February or 22 September, is not really that I should bake a cake or to worry about whether I can remember where I hid the presents. The first thing I think of is that this was the day I gave birth. That it was a hugely monumental day in my life too, a day I achieved something, a day I changed, a tremendously significant day in my story as well as in the children’s stories. And I take a minute or two to remember what that day was like. What it was like in the morning when there was no baby. What it was like as the baby was born. What it was like calling them by name for the first time. They remember none of this. I remember it all.
This matters to me. I had this terrible, deadening feeling after child number one was born that as his story began, mine ended. That the book of Francesca had just closed and I would forever more be a minor character in other books. Years on, it is still a relief to me that my story is still being written, that I am still writing it and that my children are a huge subplot, but that the arc of my life (my lovely, selfish, individual life) stretches unbroken. So for a few moments in the quiet early morning, I celebrate how these birth days also belong to me.
Then I pull on socks and go down to set up the birthday child’s breakfast-in-bed tray, find presents, start mixing the cake and make ready to celebrate the amazing, confounding, stunning existence of my children on this earth and in my life.
Wow. What really perfectly stated thoughts about becoming a mother, and yet how motherhood does not become the whole of who you are. Happy Birthday to your son as well… my son is only a few months from the big number 2.
Awesome post. I used to think I would die if I had kids. Now I have two, and I still think they’ll be the death of me one day! What a great reflection, though.