Love + Family: The Birthday

THE BIRTHDAY Copyright © 2011 by Ashley
Barron

All rights reserved. No part of this book may
be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means,
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permission in writing from the author, except by a reviewer who may
quote brief passages in a review.

Smashwords Edition: November 2011

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The Birthday

“
D
o you love me?”

I sweep narrowed eyes over my young son. My
mind churns with suspicion. Is it report card time? No. Did I hear
glass breaking in last few minutes? No. Is that absurd reality show
on tonight—the one he insists he’s old enough to watch? No.
Maybe.

I’m not sure.

I’m standing in the doorway of our somewhat
untidy, recently remodeled kitchen. The front of my hair is wrapped
in Velcro curlers, and I’m doing my best to conceal a quick glance
at the oven clock.

Time is not my friend.

With a hidden sigh, I glue both eyes to my
son’s face and soften the expression on my own. “I love you with
all my heart.”

He doesn’t miss a beat. “If you love me, then
how come you won’t let me get that new video game?”

Ah, the reveal.

“The matter is settled,” I assure him.
“You’re too young for it.”

“Mom!” My name becomes one long, pleading
wail. His knees are slightly bent, his hands clasped tightly
together, his eyebrows raised in that sweetest of sweet ways. I’ll
admit there have been a number of occasions when the tactic has
proven fruitful.

It’s no wonder he continues to employ it.

I ignore his whining, choosing instead to
study the cotton pajamas he’s wearing. They’re covered in his
favorite cartoon character, faded at the elbows and knees, and
stained just about everywhere in between. The fraying edges of the
pant bottoms expose mismatched socks that aren’t in any better
condition.

How does he do that so fast? Grows taller by
the second, and still he manages to demolish his clothes with time
to spare.

My daughter, on the other hand, hasn’t had a
stain on her clothes since she grew old enough to consciously avoid
dirt.

“Won’t work, sonny boy,” I say, lightly, as I
step to the kitchen island, reach across it, and tug my day planner
to me. With a few strokes of the pen, shopping for new pajamas
headlines tomorrow’s list of errands. “Won’t work.”

“Well, I
know
you love me.” My
daughter steps out from behind her brother and tosses her hair from
one side to the other. It’s still damp from her bath.

I study her face, so similar to my own.
Unlike me, she was born with confidence to spare. My husband and I
often marvel at her outspoken, self-assured ways. At least, when
we’re not picturing her as an independent-minded sixteen-year-old
with a driver’s license.

So far that image eclipses fire, natural
disaster, job loss, and my husband’s mother moving in as top on our
list of greatest fears for the future.

“Quit following me around,” I hear my son
whisper to his little sister. “I was here first.”

And by first, what he means is that time
began at the moment of his birth. Maybe it did.

His words make me smile, mostly because, as
the youngest of my siblings, I can’t relate to them. Back when I
was born, the general response was “Oh, look, another one.”

I learned how to run before I could crawl,
and how to bargain before I could speak full sentences. Not even my
senior year prom dress could escape the reality of hand-me-downs in
a big family.

I was raised with love, but not independence.
I was raised with wholesome food, but a limited menu.

Perhaps that is why I’ve been so devoted to
finding ways to empower my children, and to show them as much of
the world as my husband and I can pull into their lives.

I want them to have options, always.

The noise from my son’s pleading pulls me
back to the present. I look at my daughter, still standing
expectantly in front of me.

“You’re right. I do love you.” I can’t resist
tugging gently on her hair before turning to my son. “And that is
why, after this performance, you can add another month to the wait
time for that video game.”

He falls dramatically to the floor,
punctuating the drop with heavy groans of displeasure.

I laugh.

There will always be laughter in our
home.
Despite the ribbing we took from our family and friends,
my husband and I added those exact words to our wedding vows. At
the time, we’d had no idea how complicated it would be to honor
such a simple statement; we were young, in love, and everything was
possible.

At least, that’s what we tell ourselves.

There have certainly been periods when we’ve
worried, both individually and as a couple, that laughter had left
the sturdy walls and bright green lawn that anchor our space in
this world.

Too often, it’s simpler to light the fuse of
anger—somehow always within reach—than to commit the energy and
hard work it takes to pull smiles and laughter out of hiding at the
end of a long day.

After our vows were said the challenges had
begun almost immediately, pushing and straining against our utopian
ideals of marriage, and the future. Being madly in love with one
another hadn’t seemed to count for as much as we thought it would,
surprisingly. We hadn’t been prepared for just how quickly two
people become overwhelmed once the ink on the mortgage dries and
the pressure of merging two extended families sweeps through,
uninvited.

At the precise moment my husband and I
believed we’d finally achieved balance between our respective
families, we conceived a child.

That one act turned our own parents into
unruly children.

Suddenly, every minute of our lives, every
morsel of our love, had to be equally divided between the two
families. Competition would spring up in the oddest, most
inconvenient and annoying places. I didn’t need the stress, not
when my body was changing and my emotions were constantly leaving
me with tear-streaked cheeks.

After a while, I’m not even sure all the fuss
between our parents was about the baby. I think the competition
morphed into a battle for world domination or head cheerleader.

At least poorly behaved children could be put
in a timeout. But ill-mannered parents? There wasn’t a thing my
husband and I could do except to wait it out.

All things considered, I suppose that period
in our lives was good practice for when our son and daughter become
teenagers. I’m only just beginning to accept how close they are to
that complicated transformation.

How can they be this old, already?

Ten years ago, on the night our son pushed
his way into this world, tiny and helpless, holding our hearts in
his newborn hands, my husband and I found a new closeness.

When the nurse settled all seven pounds,
eight ounces of him into my trembling arms, I knew what it was to
hold a miracle in my very own hands.

My husband had been sitting on the bed beside
us, his body shaking with emotion, his head so close to mine his
tears rolled down my cheeks.

“Our child,” he had whispered.

It was my eyes, he would say, years later.
The way I had looked at him as I sat there with our first-born
cradled against my chest had delivered the precise coordinates of
his new place in this world.

And what was the name of that new place?

Fear.

We were terrified, the two of us—and for all
the right reasons, mind you. After five years together, a handful
of hours on a narrow hospital bed had transformed us from couple to
family.

Once we had weathered the first few months of
being new parents, we were more determined than ever to ride out
the pop-up emotional storms in our marriage with grace, calm, and
united goals.

There will always be laughter in our
home.
We had made a choice to put those words in our ceremony,
and we renewed our vow to honor them.

Most of the time, it was easy. Inspiration
was all around us.

Watching the kids learn to crawl and walk and
feed themselves was pure comedy.

Bandaging up my husband after his attempts at
home improvement projects wasn’t funny, but his excuses for why
things went wrong certainly were.

And we would hoot for days over the
expression on our pizza delivery guy’s face when thick smoke from
my latest culinary disaster would greet him at the door.

I often think of sunlight as laughter. It
streams in through the windows, tickling me, following me from room
to room as the day grows. But I can’t hold sunshine in my hands,
can I? I can’t bottle it up for when the rain comes.

How I wish I could.

In every soul—mine, my husband’s—there exists
those deepest, darkest, most stubborn days when a light simply will
not shine.

We have seasonal strategies for those bleak
days, my husband and I. On quiet summer nights, for example, we’ll
sneak out into the backyard after the kids are asleep and wedge
ourselves into a single lawn chair. In between kisses, we’ll try to
outdo one another with tall tales of child rearing.

Blame it on the giddy combination of
moonlight, and surviving another day of parenting, but once I
laughed so hard I popped a button right off my blouse. It flung
itself up in the air and twirled around before landing in the
pocket of my husband’s shirt.

To this day, he keeps that button in a metal
dish his Grandpa gave to him when he was a kid. That old tarnished
bowl sits on his bedside table. Every night, he takes off his watch
and his wedding ring and puts them inside for safe keeping.

My husband tells me that when he reaches into
it in the mornings, his fingers always seem to find the button
first, beginning his day with thoughts of me, and of moonlight and
laughter and kisses.

He thinks there is magic in his Grandpa’s
dish.

I think there is magic in us.

Love notwithstanding, sometimes the stress in
our lives piles up in thick, iron-heavy heaps of trouble. During
those times when we aren’t able to find the patience to speak
civilly to one another, or to listen without criticism, we try to
stay in separate corners until the heat of the moment burns itself
out.

We don’t argue often; it’s not our style.
Sure, we engage in spirited debates—we’re parents, after all—but we
don’t argue. I won’t let us.

It is never the verbal contest of wills, the
actual process of shouting arbitrary, needless threats at one
another that I worry will jeopardize our love.