reflecting on a year of life

I didn’t suspect that I’d get choked up singing you your first happy birthday — you in your blue cone hat with the octopus cake and single candle before you, your eyes jumping curiously from person to person. I never meant that stupid old song as much as I did right then.

You can’t know what you mean to us. Our family was busted, bleeding, fugitives holding on and making do with what was left – and then we lost your older sibling. Only eight weeks into the pregnancy, but it colored everything in death.

You can’t know any of that, nor how nervous we were when you began. Clenching our breaths each time the doctor searched for your heartbeat. Thrilling at the reassuring feel of your kick (and kick, and kick!) inside. The night of your birth we could have lost you, came close, stared down God … and then, after an overnight prelude of crashing rain and booming thunder, with a last surprising push from your mother you exploded into our lives.

Yes, you are as noisy and dramatic as your entrance: the ever-walking, lung-bellowing boy who does not sleep. But you are also sincere, and cuddly, and curious, your twinkling eyes perpetually braced for a laugh. It took a month before we saw your first smile, a month of wondering if you even liked us – only to learn that we’re your greatest entertainment.

You can’t know what you mean. It’s not what you do or who you are – it’s that you are. Without the slightest effort on your part, the very fact of you tipped the scale from sadness back to hope, from the long sigh of death to a monumental exclamation of life.

We rejoice in you, and glimpse, as we do, just a little of how God sees you – and even how He sees us. You have done nothing, yet you have changed everything. It’s not your looks or your talents or your personality (though we love those, too). It’s simply you.

Thank you for being our son.