Happy Birthday, River

Dear River,

You are three.

I wanted to post that newborn photo of you in the purple fairy dress but I can’t find it. I had hoped to record your entry into the day, they way you would laugh when I sang you awake. Catching the wave of wonder together, the wonder of being alive, we’d feel warm and safe. Your birthday! Yea. But the camcorder is dead, can’t find the power cord.

You fought the waking and my expectations with screams and kicks, and I totally understand. Only one second ahead of you, more desperate for normalcy than anything, I hold up a perky dress, the pink floral summer one, and pray that it’ll pass the test.

It doesn’t.

We have thirty minutes to dress, eat breakfast, bake gluten-free, dairy-free, soy-free cookies, make a picture board full of your photos for all the kids to see.

No time to shower for me, just whip on jeans, brush my teeth too hard, glance, passable, glance, pain, apply mascara, rose the cheeks, glimmer on the lips, and I don’t want any of it this morning.

And then, just as the flashbacks drive down the main street of memory, your intensifying screams turn it all into a movie in fast-forward. That quality of screaming and choking, breath catching in staccato moans, and I pull the cookies out of the oven. My childhood is not your childhood, a mantra in three parts.

Not hopeful, now I want it all to stop. And it doesn’t stop. Trying to help, your dad attempts to put on your shoes. Writhing screams on the floor and I paste photos onto poster board. Thirty minutes late.

We drive in silence, walk down the corridor in silence, hand over the goods to the teacher and leave. Turning back to look in the window, you are smiling. Your teacher gives you a hug, says Happy Birthday, and holds up your photos.

Something lifts and all is well in your world. Just like that, pain to pleasure, to hell and back. Fog all around the house this morning, all the way to school, and now, clouds part for the sun.

Easy to let it all bring me down, as far as I want to go. That's tempting. Harder and better to let life work on me, water over stone for a thousand years, to form a new portrait of what celebration can include.