Boys' Birthday

Thirteen years ago on the morning of Monday, May 12, 2013 I got in my car in Dallas and started to drive to Louisville. Adri had finally been admitted to the hospital after being in labor in some form for a day or so. The original due date had been May 20, so it was a bit of a surprise and a little early, so I was a bit impatient with the 800-plus mile journey ahead of me. I desperately wanted to get there before she gave birth and because of that the miles seemed to creep along.

It gave me time to think and reflect about her life and about the new direction her life was about to take. I was excited for her, if not a bit scarred and worried for her just in the normal way a parent worries about their children. She was a carrying and empathetic person who always put others before herself and I knew she’d thrive as a mother, but I also knew the heartbreak and challenge and effort that this huge responsibility could bring.

As I drove by weathered “Jesus Saves” billboards and lonely desolate Murphy gas stations out in the middle of nowhere, Arkansas I’d daydream about the future that lay in front of her: children, family, a life well-lived and self-actualized, and for the first time since she was born I began to feel a wave of contentment pass over me. It was an interesting feeling.

Right outside of Little Rock the phone rang and I saw it was Stephen so I pulled over to the shoulder and answered. Bryce had just been born, and baby and mother were both doing fine. Suddenly my daughter was a mother, and everything seemed to change and I started to cry.

It seems hard to believe now, with the year of tears I’ve had, the non-stop continual crying caused by unrelenting grief these past 12 months, but I hadn’t cried at all in the preceding 40 or so years save for when my grandfather died four years previously, and it took me off guard.

I don’t think I’d ever cried out of happiness before, either.

I pulled myself together and sat for a moment before continuing on, searing the moment in my brain, the moment my daughter became a parent and I a grandfather. It was easily without question or much competition one of the happiest moments of my life, and it happened outside of Little Rock, Arkansas of all places.

The remaining 500 miles to Louisville and my daughter and grandson both flew by and took forever, but I was on autopilot regardless, and finally I arrived and went to her hospital room to meet Bryce and hug the new mother.

She was bouncing around the room, refusing pleas from everyone to relax and rest. She was happy and content as was I. I sensed a sea change, and for a while, that’s just what it was. She was focused and healthy, happy and determined.

Later that year Adrianna, Stephen and Bryce moved to Dallas and I was ecstatic. Two years later to the day Wesley was born. He had a bit of a rougher time at the beginning and had to be in NICU for a week or so. I got to spend a lot of one-on-one time with two-year-old Bryce while his mom and dad tended to his brand-new brother during that week, but that first day, the day which was his birthday as well, I showed him a photo on my phone of Wesley, and he seemed enthralled. He carried that phone around with Wesley visible for hours.

On the way home from the hospital a few days later they both just kept staring at each other in their car seats. It was heartwarming. Much to her chagrin, Adri was an only child, and I knew she didn’t want Bryce to be an only child. Her two children are clearly each other’s best friend; they’re lucky to have each other and share a birthday, even though Adri was originally hoping they’d each get their own day. She knew that Wesley would come on the 12^th, though, and she was right.

The two boys have different personalities, different strengths, different weakness, and different needs, which is not surprising, of course. They also are both very similar, however: fierce defenders of their mom and dad and of each other. I love them dearly as did Adrianna.

They were her whole world. Believe me, I can relate. It saddens me that she won’t get to see them become adults and start their own lives, that she won’t get to see them find love and start their own families, that she won’t get to be a doting grandmother, that they’re forever locked in time at 10 and 12.

But I know she’s proud of them, and her memory and her life and her impact upon them will be there forever.