My son is turning 30 and nothing makes sense and everything is beautiful

#blog52 #week45

Alexander Quincy Hart

“May your father and mother rejoice; may she who gave you birth be joyful!” Proverbs 23:25

This is going to be the shortest, most off-the-cuff, stream of consciousness, unproofread post I’ve shared, because this week has gotten away from me and I basically have a twenty-minute window here to upload a couple of photos and write and post a blog entry, which is too bad because the subject matter deserves better.

That subject matter being the fact that my beloved firstborn son, the boy who forever changed my name to Mom, is turning 30 years old this Sunday. This does not seem possible, but I’ve checked the math and it’s true.

Somehow that sweet, gorgeous baby right there turned into a funny, handsome, wicked smart, super-responsible, full-grown man with a wife, a job, a dog and a house in the suburbs. It is the craziest thing.

Do you remember the scene at the beginning of the movie City Slickers, when the Billy Crystal character is asleep in bed when his mother calls?

Mitch: Hi, Mom.
Mom (on telephone): It’s September 8th, 1952. We’re driving back from your Aunt Marsha. My water breaks. Your father jumps the divider of the highway and races me to Doctor’s Hospital. And… [laughs] … at 5:16, out you came. Oh… happy birthday, Darling. Here’s your father.
Dad (on telephone): Hello, boy. Happy birthday.
Mitch: Hi, Dad. How you doing?
Dad (on telephone): I’m losing feeling in my left leg. Here’s your mother.

I could be that mom. I never get tired of telling his birth story. Because everything changed for me that day in 1987. I get the whole things about your heart walking around outside your body.

We met up for early birthday dinner last night, and instead of retelling his birth story, I retold his first birthday story, about how he got so sick so suddenly and nearly died from bacterial meningitis just a few days before his birthday, but then once he was diagnosed and got on the IV antibiotics he got better right away, and we spent his first birthday in the hospital, so incredibly relieved and thrilled that he was alive and trying to climb out of his steel cage of a hospital crib.

And he likes hearing the story just as much as I like telling it, and every year I feel grateful all over again at the miracle that I get to be his mom.

I’ve got to run now. If you see this guy, tell him his 30s are going to be amazing.

Alex in the middle, with his brother Logan. They have my heart.

Tags: 30th birthday, adult children, birthdays, motherhood