Happy Birthday Nathan!

Two days old.



Two years old.

Two years ago my son Nathan was born.

One day I was walking home from the bus stop. I was worried about Nathan's speech and I was going over in my mind whether speech therapy was the right choice. I noticed Mike's car pull up in front of our house, having just picked up Nathan from daycare. He was about half a block away from me and about to parallel park when he stopped. When I reached the car, Nathan was beaming at me.

And then Mike told me what had just happened.

He was about to park when Nathan pointed towards the approaching figure and squealed, "Mama!"

And I wish I could have framed that scene for the next checkup so I could say, "See? This is what I want. This is more than enough for me."

I have this vague memory from science class about the area between ocean and shore called the interstitial zone. Sea plants who cling onto rock have to endure extreme variables of low and high tides. They have to live through waves constantly crashing over them. This is how I feel about being Nathan's mother. I live in the interstitial zone--a place where I feel like I'm sometimes drowning under the grueling water loaded with doctors and their cold checklists or other judgmental mothers or a workload that keeps me in the office and sometimes I'm exposed and gasping and needing more and more of this magical boy.

And in the moments when I pretend I'm asleep and my son comes over and kisses me repeatedly or he runs so fast with he plows into me or when he can recognize his own mother from the end of the street, my heart balloons in my chest and it presses against my ribs so tightly that I don't know if I'm going to suffocate under the aching power of being this beautiful child's mother but I welcome it all in as I have for these past two years.