My Birthday Girl

Five years ago at this time, I was lying on the couch in the living room, pretending I was not in labor. At 10:30 the next morning, my beautiful baby girl was born. It was the most perfect moment of my life. Even now, even after the processing of her birth led me to make very different choices for my next birth, even after I would never choose the circumstances of that hospital birth ever again, I still feel the same way about that beautiful moment in which she entered the world and made us a family. Because now, five years later, what I remember about her birth -- what matters most to me -- is the way I looked into her eyes as she was placed on my chest, and the way I thought, I know you. I cannot even begin to explain the connection I felt, or the ways in which my heart was broken and made into something completely new.

(There is something about nursing an infant to sleep, about looking down into that sweet, trusting face and tracing the curve of a cheek, and understanding that your heart will break, and break, and break for this child in ways you have yet to grasp.)

Things that will always be part of Suzannah's birth story: the gray morning; the way the city of Tacoma looked from the fourteenth (or was it twelfth?) floor of the hospital; the way my heart burst with joy to hear Matt cry, "We have a girl!" and the way his arms encircled us both; the way she looked at me and I looked at her; the grilled cheese someone knew to bring me almost immediately (and indeed, the way that grilled cheese was the most fabulous thing I had ever tasted, even though it was brought up from a hospital cafeteria on a Sunday morning); the way my daughter felt in my arms as we were wheeled into our little postpartum room; the way I couldn't wait to unswaddle her and feel her against my body. These are the things I tell my little girl when I tell her about the morning she was born.

"I used to have very tiny feet when I was a baby," she says. She is distracted when I tell her about her birth; tonight, she is more interested in talking about actual babies, like Isaac. She is not a baby any longer, after all.

"Isaac is almost a toddler," she said to me tonight. "And I used to be a toddler."

"Isaac actually is a toddler," I replied, even though I still need -- need! -- to think of him as my baby.

Suzannah is neither toddler nor baby, although lately she likes to pretend that she is a baby frog or a baby owl or a baby bear, and I am Mommy Frog or Mommy Owl or Mama Bear. (I suspect it isn't unusual for an older sibling to need to be the baby again every now and then, and sometimes I think we both need that. So she crawls into my lap and snuggles like a baby, and I don't remind her that she's not a baby. Because I already know how much I'll miss this, and that moment will come long before I'm ready.) At five, she is both sensitive and spunky, exuberant and affectionate. She has been so excited about her grandparents coming for her birthday, and even though she has only met her great-grandma a handful of times in her life, she is very concerned about her not feeling well (she is in town, but has been "resting" in her hotel since she arrived). She makes sure Isaac never goes to bed without hugs and kisses from his big sister, even if she tattled on him five minutes earlier for touching her stuff. (Or, you know, touching any stuff that she played with at one time or may consider playing with at some undetermined point in the future.) She loves to draw pictures of the people she loves. She loves to cuddle during bedtime stories. She loves gymnastics class, and during warm-ups as she runs around the gym with her coach she tries to look very serious, all business, but she can't help but break into a grin.

She brings me so much raw, pure joy.

She also takes me to the edge of my sanity, probably because she's a lot like me -- or because she's holding up a mirror to everything I face in myself. At the same time, I never want to reduce her by saying she is like me or like Matt or like anyone besides herself; she is her own beautiful self. And that is all she ever needs to be.

Tomorrow, we are going to have breakfast together -- just our little family. Banana waffles. And then we're going to get ready for her family birthday party. We're going to take her to Grandpa and Grandma's hotel and we're going to swim in the pool, and then we're going to come home and have a birthday barbecue with the people who love her best. Her daddy and Isaac and me. Her Grandpa Chuck and Grandma Diane, her Grandpa Jim and Grandma Cindy, her Uncle Aaron and Auntie Morgan and Great-Grandma. We are going to eat Strawberry Shortcake ice cream cake -- her choice. (I feel particularly pleased and nostalgic that she wants a Strawberry Shortcake party, because it was on my fifth birthday that my parents gave me my beloved Strawberry Shortcake dollhouse, the very same dollhouse that I've passed on to my children.) She will open her birthday presents. She will, undoubtedly, be very gracious -- she always says something like, "Oh, I love it! Thank you!" (And it still sounds like Mank you! which I will miss so much someday.)

I have always loved birthdays. Mine or anyone else's, really. I was deeply lucky to have a family who made me feel cherished every year. My best birthday memories are not of particular presents, or huge parties; rather, I remember the ways in which the people in my life -- my parents, or my husband -- have tried to make me feel special on that day. I'll never forget waking up on the morning of my tenth birthday to see the little pink clock next to my bed, the same clock my mother had been given for her eighth birthday (I think?). I was only ten, but that clock -- something that connected me to my mother in ways I could not articulate at the time -- meant more to me than any shiny, new gift I could have received. I'll never forget the way I felt when I unwrapped a pair of pierced earrings on my eleventh birthday, my parents' way of letting me know I could get my ears pierced two years earlier than they'd originally dictated.

And that is what I want to give my children on their birthdays -- the feeling of being cherished. Celebrated. Whatever that may mean for them at the time, whether it means swimming in a hotel pool while Grandpa and Grandma cheer them on, or a trip to the zoo or the Children's Museum, or having Daddy's banana waffles and playing at the park before eating the best ice cream cake they've ever tasted.

I don't know if it will ever be possible for them to understand the joy they bring to my life. Maybe I couldn't understand how much my own parents loved me until I loved my own children.

Tonight, on the eve of my little girl's fifth birthday, I'm thinking about how becoming a mother has made my heart so much larger than it ever was before, about how my children have made me want to be the best version of myself that I can possibly be. I haven't lost myself. No matter what I imagine I sacrifice, I'm not diminished; it's just the opposite. And the gratitude brings me to my knees. The gratitude, and the love. It's more than I could ever ask for, and it's more than I deserve.

Happy Birthday, my beautiful baby girl. No matter what life throws at you, may you never, ever doubt how much, how deeply, you are loved.