My Baby, My Boy

In fourteen days, my baby will be one year old.  People are asking me the plan for the first birthday.  I’m working 12,13,14 hour days, his father is working endless days, we are in two different cities, relying on family to help with child care, spending buckets of money on gas and maintaining two households.  There is no plan for a first birthday as yet.

It falls on a Wednesday.  They will come here to the city where I’m living this summer, so that I can see him on the Big Day.  I will leave work as early as I can.  I can’t bake a cake for him, the way I like to do for my boys, because there is no oven here in the hotel.  We’ll buy a cupcake from Publix.  I suppose he should have presents, so there can be pictures, though the thought of more toys in my house makes me want to cry a little bit.  Oh Lordy, the plastic.

I joke a lot about him being my second child, ergo The One We Love Less.  Of course that isn’t the truth, and he’ll always know it.  But he has always had a little less from us.  The real truth is that we love him more than we can say, and we have made lots of room for him in our lives, but this has been a crazy pell mell year for us, this one year of Liam’s life.  Our personal and professional endeavors this year have been satisfying, and positive – but also all-encompassing, and exhausting.  It’s probably good for Liam, to not be the center of attention.  There’s always Jack there talking our ears off, and then Mama’s always got to read, Dada’s always got to write.  One thing my second little boy knows – the world does not revolve around him.  He’s part of a team, here, one of four.  He is a sturdy little self-sufficient kid.  He’ll never remember his mother’s second year of law school, when she almost broke down about a zillion times, surrounded by stacks of law books and papers due.  He won’t have any memories of his father’s final year of a long PhD process, when Dada nearly put his boot through the computer screen a zillion times, sick of that blinking cursor.  He won’t recall those moments when we’d ponder our work, glance at our kids, and then drop everything, take a short break, and go sweep up a giggling baby and play with him for a minute or two.  A minute or two is all Liam has ever really required.

Liam, my little LiLi, a minute or two is not all you are to me – I think of you every minute of every day.