Dear Jack,
Sometime in the summer, I wrote you a letter about the day you would be born. I wanted some things on the record. So many people told me that once you were here, I would barely be able to remember life without you. They are right. And they are wrong.
I do remember my fears about your safety. I remember obsessing over each of your little kicks, but I don't remember what those kicks felt like. Not exactly anyway. I remember that I loved you but I don't remember what it felt like not to know your face, your cry, your little (big) fingers wrapped around my own. Not exactly anyway.
Then you were a beautiful mystery, a boy wonder (as in wonder how we're going to do this, wonder who this boy will look like, wonder what his dreams will be).
When I think about telling you about the day you were born, I know that all the thoughts I had about it before are a part of it, a little (big) footnote.
So here it is, an echo from a time when you were real and present and at the same time still a shadow, a movement in the dark, a slow and steady train of a heartbeat.
---
Yesterday we got a call that we've been waiting for. We finally found out that we'll meet you via C-section. I told everyone that it didn't matter to me one way or another. Actually, I let people believe that it might even be my preference. Scheduled. Medicated. Quick.When it came down to it, I cried when Daddy told me the news. (I didn't want other people--other mothers--to say how silly it was to want the pain, the uncertainty, the hours of breathing in and out, the swearing or screaming, the pleading and praying.)
All the same, lots of people have already told me how lucky I am, how much easier this is going to be, and maybe I cried because it makes me angry to be treated like this way--our way--is the way out. As if you and I are going to get a pass on this right of passage.
More than that, though, it broke my heart to think that I won't have a story to give you. After all, I love stories. I believe in their power--to change you, to inspire you, to make you fall in love. What story is more important than the one about how you came to be in the world. I so wanted you to have this: a collection of funny details, a sense of the drama, a glorious moment of resolution and revelation. I thought that you and I were being robbed of our birthright.
But tonight I realized that your story doesn't start some day in December. It began a long time ago. Some part of it started ninety years ago with another baby boy by the same name. Some part of it reverberates to the tune of old pub songs. Some part began with a question, with "where have you been?"
For my part and Daddy's, there were beers in Berlin and a sad, squeaky confession. There were tears in London and sodden, shoeless proposal. Your father and I have laughted and cried and walked down an aisle together. We danced our way to the dotted line and sometimes, we had to fight and plead and pray. We spent some days just breathing in and out to get to this place. To be here for you. To be here with you.
Baby boy, your birth isn't the beginning of your story. Far from it. The story of you is already in full swing. There are plenty of funny asides and when you are older, I'm sure we'll tell you some of them. And believe me when I tell you that there will be moments--so many moments--of glorious revelation.
I, for one, can't wait to see what happens next.
---
You are still a beautiful mystery
. But you are also a wriggling Houdini of a boy, with bluish eyes and reddish hair and rosebud lips. I think you're going to be a bit of a character and I maintain that you have a story, a story that stretches way back before you were two cells together and one that I can only hope will stretch way beyond my own lifetime. I'm going to try to hold as much of that story here for you. I promise that the next post will be that birth story that I was so worried about. As it turns out...you had your own kind of drama, your own special beginning.
Like I said, I can't wait to see what happens next.
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