On your Birthday

Last night I woke in the middle of the night, like I do so often now. I looked out the window and saw the waning moon. And all I could think of was you. I keep trying to figure out the perfect theoretical thing to say to pull you back. Or convince you somehow that you are perfect just as you are: if I could only figure out that perfect phrase- there must be one! There must be a perfect thing to say or do that I haven’t done or said to somehow pull you back from this disastrous precipice.

I wake in the morning and the reels of your childhood and adolescence begin again across the front of my mind. The normal-ness - the trains, the stuffed animals, the Legos, the plethora of matchbox cars, and the endless hours of your handmade games. And then the streams of tears cover my cheeks, they run down past my chin, down my neck. Your birthday is tomorrow. Away at college. Our first without you. If only I could pull you back. My mother’s heart wishes I could pull you back, sometimes even back into my womb and maybe start over so that we could do the right things, fix what we must have failed at before.

But you can’t go back. We are here now. And all I can say is, please just love yourself the way you are. The way God made you. If you could only see how unique and interesting and exciting you are. That would be my birthday gift to you: to show you how exceptional you already are. That there’s nothing about you that I or anyone else would change. I’d wrap it in the most special box- even wrap it in pink and luminescent colors if that’s what you’d like. Maybe I’d put a kitten in there and you wouldn’t be allergic at all anymore.

You’d open the box and you could unwrap every little perfect layer of yourself the way others already see you. You’d see all the love and light and all the adventure and insight that you are!

And you’d see you wouldn’t have to change a thing. I love you. Happy Birthday.