Eighteen!
March was a completely insane month for me–my sister is getting married on Saturday, so it started at the beginning of the month with her wedding shower, then my husband’s 40th birthday party, then Easter, than another sister’s 20th birthday, then my son’s 18th birthday party, then….wait, let’s repeat that last.
My son turned 18 years old.
I will try not to get too mushy here as I already did that when he turned 16 and that does just fine to describe why his turning 18 is extra incredible. Suffice it to say that the first year of Michael’s life was difficult, everything we were told, everything we read said he wouldn’t live to be one year old. Doctors appointments 3x a week, hospital stays again and again, oxygen, feeding tubes, and then some how I found myself in the parking lot of Toys R Us with my husband and son to pick up something and it hit me like the proverbial ton of bricks that he was turning one years old in the next week or two. I had blocked myself from thinking of his first birthday because it had changed the instant we learned what he was born with from a happy occasion to some kind of horrible dead line or expiration date. Needless to say, we went a little crazy in Toys R Us that day crash shopping for a beautiful first birthday.
Since then, birthdays for my son have always come with that mixed bag of emotions–elation, apprehension, joy for today, fear for the future all jumbled up together. Eighteen. Eighteen has hit me like the first birthday did–I never thought about his turning one–but, eighteen!
I am so proud of my son. I am proud of his strength of body and mind, but I am most proud of his spirit. He is what people might call a gentle soul and his intuitive compassion teaches me things that I struggle with all the time. Children sense it and are drawn to him, and animals sense it and are drawn to him–there is a quiet, compassionate strength in him that I find inspiring. He is quiet, most often, drawing 9 times out of 10, so that when he bursts into noisy exuberance (usually either when playing a favorite video game or in talking to his birds)–it’s surprising, shocking really, and even if it is so loud it is driving you crazy, you have to laugh because it is so full of pure enthusiasm.
I think turning eighteen was a little discombobulating to him as well, but he came to me with the conclusion that age didn’t really matter–he would just be himself whatever that meant, and that would be okay.
It’s more than okay. Happy Birthday, Michael, I look forward to many many more birthdays of you just being wonderfully you.
(Note: Click the picture above to see the slide show I put together for the party–you’ll have to imagine the music–Iz’s version of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow”, then Five for Fighting’s “100 Years”, ending in the last part of Yael Naim’s “New Soul”)
I can’t believe Mikey is 18! I can remember him coming to our family reunion on the farm as an infant - such a beatiful day, such a beautiful little boy! I remember thinking about how our lives were so different at that time…you were a wife and a mother to a little boy who would teach you so much and take you places you never dreamed you would go. I was barely responsible for my cat, my jobs, and getting myself to my classes at college… A few years later I would need to draw on your experiences, your knowledge, your strength,your peace, the grace that you had been given through your beautiful son to get through what I was facing with my own. I don’t know what I would have done without you, without knowing someone else who had been in the wondering stage….without Mikey either… He is always so kind to his cousin who is 10 and has autism. Ian is quiet and serious and likes to talk to him when he sees him. I am glad Ian feels that peace during those crazy reunions…with all those people -he knows just whom to reach out to, and knows where to go. Yea, Mikey! Happy Birthday.