Happy Birthday, Beautiful!

It has been just about seventeen years to the minute since I FINALLY got my grandmother to pick up her phone.  My grandmother, who complained endlessly that she couldn't sleep past 4:00 or 5:00 a.m., was nowhere to be found at 7:00 a.m. that day!  Well, yes, she was, of course, somewhere -- she was ASLEEP!  So what were all her complaints about?  Sound asleep, while I was trying to tell her that she had a new great-granddaughter.  My husband was asleep, too.  Honestly, what a pathetic crowd.  My daughter and I were WIDE awake.

Our daughter was born at 2:01 a.m. after a tumultuous two days of laboring toward a VBAC (vaginal birth after caesarean) in an era in which virtually every woman who had given birth by caesarean section got the opportunity to repeat the experience for all subsequent deliveries.  As I recall, I had interviewed something like 18 doctors and midwives before finally settling on one I thought would be able to help -- and help he did.  Typically for me, I had more serious complications with a singleton than I had ever had with a twin pregnancy, but everything worked out in the end.  Besides my husband, I had both a wonderful doula and a terrifically restrained doctor with me every second of the way.

But today is my daughter's day, not mine.  When she was born, she looked at us with the most wonderfully limpid blue eyes, utterly calm and attentive.  She moved on quickly to a first birthday with her family in attendance at Chautauqua, to backyard parties with a dozen little kids, to capture-the-flag and swimming and dinner parties.  When she was five, she managed to have four birthday parties -- one at preschool in May, since she has a summer birthday; one on her real birthday at family camp in North Carolina; one at my stepsister's in Georgia; and one at home shortly afterward.  Last year she hosted 15 friends at a Mexican restaurant.  This year she's elected to forego the party -- the girl who loves a crowd has finally been stumped by her conviction that her friends are too diverse and, therefore, don't get along well enough to spend an evening together.  So it will be cupcakes for the soccer team after scrimmages this morning and a family dinner tonight.

I am not overly sentimental today.  I can see that the passage through senior year and on to college is going to be a tough one.  In fact, I suggested this morning that, having abandoned "Sweet Sixteen," she had perhaps reached "Sarcastic Seventeen."  She agreed that my description was apt.

Nevertheless, she's still a lovely, talented, generous and giving young woman, and I'm delighted to claim her.  Happy Birthday, sweetie!