Published in The Fauquier Times-Democrat, Weekend Edition on Fri. March 2, 2012
Our three boys’ birthdays fall in the space of one month. They will soon be 7, 14, and 17. The youngest was born on February 28th in Ohio in 2005, just five months before we moved here. He is finally forty pounds. Here is one child who is happy to be in a booster seat because it’s a promotion from that car seat. Happy Birthday, Nathaniel!
The two older boys were born in Northern California. The middle son will be fourteen on March 31st. Happy Birthday, Niles!
My eldest son, who is the third child, has his birthday on March 4th. Happy Birthday, Sergio! I can’t believe you’re 17.
There were times that I thought he might not survive childhood. Sometimes, frankly, I thought I wouldn’t survive him. He was chronically sick, tortured by an eczema that prevented him from sleeping through the night, and besieged by so many food allergies that he could only eat what I made at home, from scratch. Have you tasted my cooking? As if he wasn’t tortured enough.
I know how fortunate we are – we have anesthesia and antibiotics and public sanitation. We have relatively easy transportation and ridiculously easy communication. We can expect our children to survive infancy. We live in a vastly wealthy nation compared to most of the inhabitants of earth. We have access to plentiful and safe food, and we usually have clean water. (I hope this doesn’t raise any blood pressures in Bealeton.) We live in a time and place where our dangers tend to be the hurried pace of life or the excess of things – food, pleasure, possessions, and leisure time.
But there are always the challenges. People who have not lived with a two-year-old human being sometimes don’t understand how unreasonable these cute little people can be. The theory of getting them to do what you want, when you want, is very simple - until you try to put it into practice. This varies with each child, adult, your combined moods, and temperaments. Other factors may include the ambient air pressure, which side of the bed you happened to roll out of, and whether or not you are wearing “angry” colors.
When our two eldest daughters were two and four years old, my brother, who was doing his medical residency rotations, came to stay with us in Northern California. He brought with him my very sweet sister-in-law, a perennially cheerful person, and their two sons, ages four and three at the time. Our household expanded to eight people, with half of them being preschoolers.
Those five or six weeks were a joyous time. It flew by. After a few days together, however, I thought to myself that my sister-in-law didn’t quite understand child discipline. Those boys were out of control, I thought. Poor thing.
Then, I had a boy of my own.
Not just any boy, either. He was Sergio. Much of his infancy is a blur of projectile vomit and his screaming whenever I tried to set him down. There was crying to, but I soon learned to control my emotions. I used to load him into a backpack carrier just so I could vacuum the house.
(It would be years later when I finally acquiesced and let my husband talk me into having a cleaning service help us out. There should be no question as to who is the smarter one. What was I trying to prove, exactly? That I could do it all, save money, and become neurotic whenever sticky hands approached a glass door I had just cleaned?)
My Sergio might have been a difficult baby, but he was also exceptionally (and redeemingly) cute. I might be biased, but on a tour through Yosemite National Park once, a woman cooed over him and asked repeatedly if she could take him with her. There is a fine line between flattering and frightening someone. By the end of the ride, I was scared.
Sergio became a difficult little boy, perhaps because he saw and valued things differently. His younger years were filled with what, to me, were weird obsessions. I developed coping mechanisms. I allowed him to ride in his car seat while holding an electric weed whacker just so we could get places. I took him to church with a thirty-foot extension cord coiled into a big diaper bag.
By the time he was three, my parenting skills had not just deteriorated: They were gone. Leaving the grocery store, a bagger who once escorted me could not understand why I insisted on pushing the cart. Every time she tried to commandeer the cart, Sergio, buckled in the cart, had a shrieking fit. She gave up and let me push. She bounced along beside me and said, “You know, my younger brother was just like that. They finally put him on lithium.” She eyed my boy and leaned over and whispered, “Have you looked into lithium?”
Sergio is now taller than me (not difficult), weighs more than me (a little more difficult), and is a young man I am proud to claim. The past seventeen years have been quite a ride! Even without the lithium.
Happy Birthday, "Surge"!
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