May Good Luck Go With You, And Happiness Too

Someone asked me how it feels having become the mother of a twenty-three year old today.

How does it feel? Let’s see…it feels weird. I remember being twenty-three myself and it doesn’t feel like it was that long ago. So it also reminds me about my own aging, of course. That does, and my knees do, too.

It also feels good thinking about my son being young and happy and full of life. It makes me hopeful that he has had a good childhood and beyond, and I feel really good that I’ve been able to contribute to it.

I feel proud. I admire him greatly, for many reasons. For one, he has a very witty, wry and clever sense of humor and he loves to laugh.

In our family we really put a lot of effort into finding the humor wherever we can. It’s always been that way. I guess we bond over laughing. And I love that.

My son can remember funny parts of tv shows and movies, which we ask him to perform (so to speak), often, especially because he’s really good at mimicking the voices. He cracks us up. Sometimes we’ve been guilty of asking him to do this in front of visitors and he indulges us; he must love it when we do that.

He’s very sweet, always has been and I love that about him. When I was collecting old photos to make a digital birthday collage for him, I found “My Book of Birthdays”, a memory book of his first five celebrations.

After scanning the photos I stopped to read the entries I’d made. Much of it I remembered, but one from his third year party, which were mostly adults as my friends didn’t have children yet and he’d already had a daytime party at day care, I’d forgotten.

The header read “The funniest thing that happened was “, and I’d filled in I passed out my presents and got help to open them! I’d forgotten that, but it didn’t surprise me one bit.

He’s twenty-three and he’s just out of graduate school and he’s living his life now, so that makes me incredibly excited for him, and yet also incredibly nostalgic because he’s a grown-up now. He will never again be the little boy who took my hand to cross the street.

We’re at different stages now, and that’s okay, I’m not complaining. Just like making that birthday photo collage, I love to see it all, the old and the new, and I want it firmly planted in my memory.

Because I never want to forget the times we rode on the city buses while he inadvertently entertained passengers by recognizing the fast food restaurants in his little singsong two-year-old-voice; Subway-My-Way, Pizza-Hut-and-Nothing-But, and DQ…

Let alone the time I pulled up to the dry cleaners and after parking, as I glanced down into my purse for my wallet and ticket stubs, from the back seat I heard, “Mom, we should stop for breakfast and get lunch to go!”

I looked up quite surprised, in the rear-view mirror I saw my four year olds’ questioning eyes waiting for my response. Then I noticed the bold sign in the window of an aforementioned Subway restaurant, created to look like a traffic light with STOP  in the red octagon and GO in the green…he’d read the sign. It was the cutest, funniest thing. Well to me, he was quite serious about the situation and seemed rather confused by the hilarity I’d found.

Nor do I want to forget the morning when he was in second grade and he came into our bedroom very concerned about his hamster, something was happening in its cage. It turned out he she had had babies!

Or the time I rode the train with him and his little brother all the way from Nova Scotia to Virginia, and all our adventures along the way. The high school basketball tournaments and graduation ceremonies. Proms and Homecomings. Amusement parks and doctors offices. Christmas, visiting him in Arizona last year. Highs and lows, and in-betweens. There are just so my times I want to carry with me, forever.

Every single memory, including celebrating his birthday a few days early last Friday so that he and his lovely girlfriend could come with us to watch his younger brother’s football game, contributes to how I feel today. I feel happy.

I feel happy, lucky, wistful, thankful, sentimental, inspired, grateful, tired, blessed; the list goes on and on. But most of all I just feel how much I love him and want the best for him.

I hope he has a very Happy Birthday!

 

 

 

— Raina K Morton September 30 2014

 

 

 

*Title from Traditional Happy Birthday Song Lyrics 

Happy Birthday to You
Happy Birthday to You
Happy Birthday Dear (name)
Happy Birthday to You.

From good friends and true,
From old friends and new,
May good luck go with you,
And happiness too.

**Also acceptable is adding cha, cha, cha.

Alternative ending:
How old are you?
How old are you?
How old, How old
How old are you?