Knit Sisters

Although there is actual knitting going on here at my house, my output has decreased significantly over the holiday season, and what is being worked on cannot be pictured here on the blog for Christmas security reasons.

So, I offer instead some thoughts about my son’s 11th birthday.  Yesterday was his birthday, and we had a little family get-together last night with cake and ice cream and gifts.  I made the cake–white cake with strawberry frosting.

 

He was a bit excited.

 

Eleven years ago, on a Sunday night, the night before my due date, I called my mother and told her, “Well, I can have the baby now.  I finished the baby quilt tonight!”  I was joking.  I thought that, being my first pregnancy and all, it was quite likely I would go over the due date.  I was just hoping I wouldn’t have the baby on Christmas.

He was born the next morning at 8:40 a.m. 

Like most mothers, I remember every detail of labor and delivery with perfect clarity.  It’s the following weeks that blend into a sleep-deprived blur.  Heck, let’s be honest.  Details of the following years blur together.  Moments stand out, though, some funny, some sweet, some unbearably sad.

I think of him as a toddler (“angel baby,” I called him, because he looked so sweet and angelic) and am overcome by sadness and sometimes, almost a kind of despair.  That child is gone now and will never be again.  He exists only in photographs and in memory.  Life with that toddler was so much simpler, in so many ways.  It was hard, too, I have to remind myself, and there were many days when I wished that things could be other than what they were.

When Harvey was a baby, I asked a mother of a five-year-old if things got easier.  She looked at me appraisingly and said, “Things get different.  Not necessarily easier.”  I had no idea.

Yet somewhere inside my great big eleven-year-old boy with all his problems, gifts, and talents, that angel baby still lives. 

After all, it’s what’s inside that counts.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 19th, 2006 at 10:06 pm and is filed under Bake it up. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.