Happy birthday..

Our son was born on Feb 12, which is still Abraham Lincoln’s birthday (my OB suggested we name him Abe) although it is no longer celebrated as a separate holiday. When we brought him home from the hospital a few days later, it was 80 degrees. Here, of course, we consider ourselves fortunate if we can venture out on Feb 12 without being bundled from head to toe. The first few years after we moved here, we posed with the cake outdoors – I guess we didn’t have a flash attachment for the camera. The picture on the left was taken in 1983, 2 years after we moved here, when he was 6 years old. And yes, the duck had every intention of flying up and helping herself to birthday cake. They were used to getting scraps from the table and for all she knew, here were some more. A year later, there we were again, with the cake. It is important for me to go back and look at these pictures that were taken during a much happier time in our lives. The good memories of being his mother, and what a sweet, lovely child he was – he was truly adorable -- are very important now. It was very easy to love him them, before things slowly began to go wrong. Oh, sure, we still love him. A kernel of that sweet, lovely little boy still lurks in there somewhere, but parenting him now that he is an adult of 29 is mostly an exercise in exasperation, depression, and frustration. If I didn’t have those good memories, then it truly would be awful