You are one. You weigh twenty two pounds and your limbs are long. You have seven teeth. You fall asleep clutching as many soft things as you can hold: a lion, a bunny, a baby, a striped bear, and two (sometimes three) blankets. You have had two haircuts. You eat eggs every day for breakfast, but you would always rather have ice cream. You have just learned to clap. You are very quiet but you love to sing. I don't know how any of this is even possible and yet I can't remember a time when it wasn't.
The day before your birthday, I took you to the toddler play area near the bookstore in the mall. The one with the printed carpet and the weird foamcore structures shaped like nonsensical things like mini trucks and a giant toothbrush. There is no less photographic or germ-infested place on the planet, but you love it so much that you start shaking as soon as we step on the escalator, and so sometimes I check my preferences for things like natural light and fresh air and we go. You crawl and crawl and creep around on the weird mini structures and you startle when the older kids leap and run in circles around you but still you love it, and I always watch you, but that day I watched you, trying to remember everything about the way you moved and the sound of your voice and I started to cry. Right there under the florescent banner of ROSS.
I like to pretend sometimes that I am a very old woman, traveled back in time to now. It helps me remember. I watch myself scrambling the eggs. Folding the laundry. Trying to make writing deadlines on 3 hours of sleep. I see the way you reach for the piano keys on your tiptoes. The shape of your body curled into my right arm, nursing in the dark after a nap. I want to beg you not to grow up, but I have read Peter Pan one too many times and know better than that. And so I will continue to time travel. Until you are taller than me and no longer want my kisses. Sometimes I will cry in embarassing places like the playground at the mall, but only because I love you. Only because I want to.
Happy first birthday, my sweet, sensitive, red-golden haired boy. Nothing I will ever do, nothing I will ever see, no one I could ever meet will mean as much to me as being your mother. You are the treasure of my life.
Mommy
