The day your first child is born, you become someone new. You may have had several months to prepare for it – probably not a full nine, because you probably didn’t know it was coming till at least a few weeks after it was underway – but in a lot of ways, you really can’t be prepared for it. You’re meeting a stranger for the first time, and after awhile that stranger will call you by a name no one’s ever used before, “Mom” or “Dad.” And if your first child is also your only child, he or she will have exclusive use of that name forever. If you have other children after the first, you’ll have the most important job you’ll ever have for even longer. Having a child doesn’t automatically make you a parent – attention, commitment, and ongoing on-the-job training do that.
I get like this every year around July 9th.
My son’s actual due date was July 4th, but he didn’t express much interest in showing up that day, and he’s always been one to do things in his own time. Four days later he decided he might be ready, but he was too big to make it out without help (I’m 4’8″ and small-boned, and this was an 8-pound, 12-ounce baby), so he was delivered by C-section at 10:11 on a Monday morning, after 21 hours of labor. His father and I didn’t know who coming, so we had names ready for either a boy or a girl, so that we could greet him or her properly. When we first held the baby a few minutes after the delivery, I told him, “Hello, Christopher Scott. We’ve been waiting for you a long time, and we already love you very much.” (Had I known that Christopher would turn out to be one of the five most popular boys’ names that year, I might have held out for something else. One of his best friends later on was actually another “Christopher Scott.”) Then he left for the nursery with his father, and I was down for the count while they finished the surgery. I don’t remember seeing him again till the next morning, and then the adventure began.
(I thought about making the labor-and-delivery story a bigger part of this, but it’s really not the part that matters, even though much of it’s still pretty clear after all this time. The back pain that started early Sunday afternoon, and that First Husband didn’t believe was labor until we timed it after several hours and found that the pains were intensifying every five minutes; the broken air conditioning at my parents’ house, where we were living at the time, that sent us to my in-laws for a few hours until we left for the hospital; the 1 AM drive to the hospital; my query to my OB seven hours later about when he would do a C-section; but what happened at the end of it, and what followed after, is what matters.)
One of my smart-aleck answers to the question of whether I wanted to have any more children used to be, “I want to see how this one turns out first.” Today he’s been a college graduate for just about two months, he’s living on his own, and he’s starting his first professional job – literally, today, on his birthday, a Monday morning 23 years later. He’s still the only one who calls me “Mom;” my stepchildren call me by my first name, and it wouldn’t be fair to their mother if they did otherwise. (When I eventually did have two more children, they were part of a package deal with their dad.) He’s still one of the people who makes me laugh the most, and I am glad to see the person he’s becoming. He’s smart, he’s funny, he has talents and interests we’ve known about for years – math, sports, writing – and some later ones we’d never have predicted – swing dancing (?!), and he knows people everywhere. I am glad for what we’ve had and curious to see what will be next. We live across the country from each other now, and I’m not sure that I’ll be seeing him at Christmastime this year, but we’re still in each other’s lives almost every day.
Happy birthday, Chris.
