The end of summer sun filters through the needles of the big pine tree, throwing shadows on the green weeds in front of me. The cicadas trill out, calling to each other in their waning days. The clear sky spreads overhead, stretching out to the autumn season so close that you can taste it in the cooling air.
Thump. I jumped up from the couch, startled by the noise. Running into my younger son’s room, I saw him on the floor. “Are you okay?” I asked. “No,” he said. He says “no” when he actually means yes and he seemed okay.
But I wasn’t okay. He had climbed out of his crib.
My younger son has always been little, despite wanting to be big. He shoved his way into the world three-and-a-half weeks early, being born at a mere five and a half pounds. He didn’t pass zero percent on the growth chart until he was a year old. And he’s the baby of the family. So my nickname for him is Little Bird.
Little Bird just turned three years old.
In the spirit of Sandra Boynton’s classic board book Little Pookie, where the small pig’s mom tells them 10 things she knows about them, here are ten things I know about Little Bird (as written to him, as in the book) on the occasion of his third birthday:
“I want daddy,” my older son (nicknamed Sprout) responded when asked who he wanted to read bedtime stories with. In the past, I would have been choking back tears. These days, I feel differently.
“Mama, [kid’s classmate] told me he was stronger than me,” said my five year old, nicknamed Sprout. “But I’m faster than him.”
“Well, you can tell him that you’re faster than him,” I responded, then immediately regretted it. “Actually, no. That wouldn’t be a good thing to say.” One, I had no idea if my kid was actually faster than the other kid. Two and more importantly, starting a comparison war was going to lead to nowhere good very quickly.
“Back in my day, kids roamed the neighborhood without supervision and nobody had these fancy birthday parties,” says yet another article about how childhood was different “back then.” While the world has changed for the good and the bad, I feel like my children’s experience isn’t all that different in some ways than mine or even my mom’s. Looking forward, it’s different in so many good ways as well.
Holding the hand of a little girl with my fiancé holding her other hand, I thought, “Perhaps this is what having kids is like.”
That’s because the little girl was not our daughter. She was one of the three girls that were part of the summer camp where my fiancé, Chris, and I were volunteering. To be honest, those three girls were the entire summer camp. But they were more than enough. Besides being the first kids to break my heart, they gave me a peek into what my fiancé would be like as a father.
A flutter of wings in the dark glided through the sky, just barely within my sight.
“I think that was a bat!” I exclaimed to my four-year-old son as we walked from the car to the house.
Another dark shadow flitted by. Then another.
“The bats are waking up!” he yelled.
Although it was bedtime, I lingered outside with him. As he danced around like a springtime sprite, I sat down on the grass. I stared up at the moon, glowing behind the fog of a cloud. The shadows of deer moved among the gravestones in the cemetery behind our house. My son regaled me with tales of the bats coming out of hibernation and the geese flying back to their homes. The signs of spring. All may not have been right with the world, but there was a little peace in that space, at that time.
When I faced going back to work after my maternity leave, my husband and I faced a very real and common challenge – how to balance household management and the mental load between the two of us.
I’m a “doer” at heart while my husband, Chris, is much more laid-back. So taking everything over was a legitimate risk for me. The mental burden of being a mom is very real, whether you embrace the role of being a “keeper” of everything or find it smothering.
Our situation had an additional twist on it. That’s because Chris was going to be taking on a role that 29% of moms hold, but only 7% of dads do – stay-at-home parent. Because I would be working outside the home and he wouldn’t, I could not be the de facto household manager. It wouldn’t be fair or practical.
So we had to find a balance of duties, both in terms of physical chores and management. Since then, we’ve learned to reduce my emotional labor and mental load as a mom. (Unfortunately, most of these don’t apply if you’re a single parent.)
“I’m done,” Sprout said, letting go of the cactus painted onto the rock-climbing wall. Looking at the wall, I half-frowned.
“Really? You were doing so well,” I said.
“Yep. That part was easy. I’m going to do it again,” he said, now on the ground. Then he started climbing again.
“Oookay,” I said, trying to be supportive while hiding my disappointment.