Happy Birth Day

From Friday, before The Worst happened.

***

One morning (this morning) something happened that wasn’t entirely unexpected but nonetheless left me slackjawed with wonder. My baby turned four.

The concept is overplayed that the birth of a baby is also the birth of a mother, but we also all know that deep-felt sentiments of this sort have a way of ringing true both loudly and clearly through the noise of all that eye-rolling. So I will say that yes, a new me was born on the day my first son was born, even though I didn’t fully realize it at the time. I’m actually still realizing it, bit by bit, and I do a little more each time I find myself caught up in something strikingly, mundanely mommish: lacing him into his first pair of (impossibly tiny) Chucks, writing his name into the tags of his clothes before sending him off to daycare for the first time, sway-dancing with his (impossibly long) toddler limbs in the lantern glow of his room, or comparing his hard little noggin to the diagram on his first Ouch Report from preschool. As a mother, I am born and reborn and then reborn again.

When the French want to say “Happy Birthday,” they say “Joyeux Anniversaire!” Ever our logical friends across the pond, they are wishing you a joyous anniversary of the day on which you were originally born. This makes good sense; if English made good sense, we would figure out a way to say that too. Instead, though, we say “Happy Birthday!” which, at least to me, always feels funny and different and clever to say to a baby on his literal Birth Day. For Americans, birthdays usually start when you’re one, not when you’re zero.

(I said usually.)

Now stand back, because here’s where I’m going to throw linguistic caution to the wind (because I do so love to live dangerously): I’m going to suggest that, when one is feeling particularly sentimental *waves*, calling the occasion at hand a “birthday,” or, rather, a “birth day,” can be more than just an inaccurate, roundabout way of labeling the anniversary of a birth. Instead, let’s let it be–let’s make it be–an invitation to be born again, as a newer, older, maybe wiser, maybe braver, maybe kinder, maybe more joyeux version of ourselves. Blowing out the candles will be a baptism. New year, new you, and all that. Let us celebrate that we have this chance to renew ourselves every year. Let us celebrate that we have this chance on our own birthdays and, as mothers, also on the anniversary of the day we became mothers.

Having a second baby simultaneously brings the babyhood of the first remarkably near while also pushing it deep into the past. Wombat’s infancy and toddlerhood is sometimes hazy and distorted, like looking at that time through the ripples of a pool, and then sometimes it’s brought into such sharp relief I feel its unforgiving stab right there under my breastbone. I look at him and I look at the baby and I look at pictures going farther and farther and farther into the past. He was that, now he’s this, and soon he will be something else entirely. Someone else. Someone I don’t yet know.

(And who will I be then? Probably not who I am or who I was.)

The world is an oyster and you are the pearl still forming out of that single grain of sand. We are all pearls.

So happy birth day to you. And happy birth day to me too.

Make a wish. Make lots of them.