Love + Family: The Birthday Read online

  Copyright

  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, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

  Smashwords Edition: November 2011

  Follow Ashley on Twitter: @dcPriya

  Read Ashley’s blog: blog.thepriyas.com

  The Birthday

  “Do 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 rid
e 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.

  No, it’s the aftermath. It’s the time spent wondering if the words we hurled at each other with increasing speed, and deadly aim, were enough to kill our relationship, permanently.

  The silence, the separation, the hurt and anger poisoning the air makes those the worst, the hardest, the most terrible days in our marriage.

  Somewhere along the way, we learned how to get through the argument, how to reach for the center, the middle ground, and trust that the other will be there take hold of the pain and sooth it away.

  To forgive.

  For us, this middle ground is music. There are certain songs we’ve both fallen in love with over the years, special songs we reserve for those times when we—and our marriage—need them. Hearing those first notes begin to play answers the question ripping its way through the soft flesh of my heart: “Is this the end?”

  Suddenly, it no longer matters who started the fight, or who fueled it, or who will be the first to say “I’m sorry.” Yes, sometimes it takes more than one song, more than one day, to bend the anger enough to reach out and take a hold of each other, to feel heartbeats and warm skin and the slide of a stubbly cheek over a smooth one.

  “Mom, why are you rubbing your cheek like that? It’s weird.”

  I stare down at my son, still on the kitchen floor, and wiggle my eyebrows at him. He’s just barely still young enough to find my face tricks amusing. Soon, I’ll have to learn a whole new set of ploys to distract him, and change the conversation.

  I turn my attention back to the list of chores I’d written out for myself this morning. Painfully few items sport confidence-building checkmarks next to them.

  At least I’d managed to accomplish the tasks I ranked as most important—groceries, delivering a forgotten field trip form to school, and mailing thank you notes on behalf of a successful fundraiser held last week.

  But the manicure? Never happened. I give a low whistle as I survey my short, plain nails.

  Lunch with my best friend? Ended up being coffee and energy bars on the sidelines of little league.

  The dog walks over and flings her body in a semi-circle around my ankles. My toes are instantly warm—and trapped. She whines pitifully in protest, no doubt, that an hour ago I swiped her favorite toys and tossed them in the washing machine.

  I suppose in the animal world, removing the stains and smells and slobber from my dog’s plush squeaker collection shows the ultimate disregard for all of the hard work she’s put into making them unfit for human contact.

  “Why did you take the toys away?”

  For a second, I think the dog—already convinced she’s human—has finally mastered English. I look back down at my feet and see that my daughter has joined her brother on the cold tiles of the kitchen floor.

  I don’t answer the question. I’m wondering if I should make them get up and relocate to the family room carpet. But I don’t. They look so adorable, so relaxed, like sunbathers on the first day of summer.

  With time moving so fast I’m determined to hold on to all the sweetness I can find in a day.

  “Don’t you love her anymore?” My son’s chin rests against the dog. His voice is muffled by her thick coat.

  I wonder why he’s so focused on the question of love, today. He’s fast approaching that age when boys discover girls, and the first blush of hormones turns into trading notes in class, sitting together at lunch, and calling each other on the phone.

  I’m dreading it.

  I don’t want him to outgrow childhood, and outgrow the reach of my mommy role as Most Important Person.

  “Of course, I love her,” I say. “That’s precisely why I cleaned her toys. She can have them back tomorrow.”

  The kids cuddle up closer to our dog, tangling themselves into a heap of limbs, pajamas and fluffy fur.

  And they begin to sing. It’s a song I thought they had long-ago forgotten. A child’s song, soft and happy. I stand completely still, afraid my slightest movement will end the magic.

  I hear the garage door rising. As my husband walks through the door, I hold a finger in front of my lips. He nods, softly, and flashes me a smile. I want to relive this moment later, much later, in life when we sit our old bones down in rocking chairs and hold wiggling grandchildren on our knees.

  Our children finish the last few lines of the song before calling out, in unison, “Hi Dad!”

  His reply is drowned out by the chimes of the doorbell. The kids and dog are up in a flash in a mad-scrabble race to the front door. Their favorite babysitter has arrived. I know all three are thrilled by the prospect of no parents for the evening.