First Lap

Well, we made it.
   A year ago, I was sleeping on a hospital couch, wondering what life would have in store. My son had just been born, and after initial worries about low heart rate, they let him into the room with us. I worried extensively about his nose. He has what I suppose would be called a button nose, but days after birth, it was pressed into his face such that he was struggling to breathe every minute. I sat there in the early afternoon and watched his face, thinking that anything could happen at this point. He made it past that.
    When he refused to go to bed, and I realised as I sat on the couch at 4:45 am with him that I was living every cliche joke about parenthood that I had ever heard, I wondered how this was going to work. I am not super dependent on sleep, but I need at least four hours to soldier through the average day. So how was I going to manage this guy waking up every two hours? It took us a long time but we figured out that the secret was counter intuitive. The milk he screamed for after dark made him urinate, which filled his diaper and made him uncomfortable, which woke him up. So we weaned him off of that, and he started sleeping from 8 pm to 6 am. Another hurdle down.
    I realised that I had made it past some invisible hurdle every morning, as I looked down at him, he would look back at me and smile his toothless smile. Some cosmic karma accountant had checked my books over and decided that everything I had done in life qualified me for one more day with this guy. This little man who figured out how to take off his dirty diaper and threw it across the room, who scared the cats every time they came into the room, who still occasionally decides that sleep is for the weak and raises hell at 230 am. He is not easy to deal with sometimes, and I often remembered my old pledges to never have a son and have the karma of my younger self to deal with. Yet, he earns his place in my soul daily. His insistence on saying 'Da Da' even when asked to say mama is amusing and heartwarming. The moments when he would stop crying and start crying when I sang songs to him add up. I find myself constantly thinking of things I can teach him in the future, principles, games, sports, languages. Right now, he resembles a lot to me, but most of all, he is the embodiment of limitless potential, and I find it fascinating. Sure, he's barely twenty pounds and has a grand total of three teeth showing, but I'm looking down the road at the horizon.
   So, every day I think of what could have happened to him, and I count it as a victory. Obviously and hopefully we have a long way to go, and I plan to be running right next to him the entire way. Happy Birthday, Damian Matthew. Welcome to lap two.