Birthday Girl

Today was my Sydney’s 4th birthday. We had a party for her, and 3 of her friends from daycare came. Unbelievably, we failed to have a camera between the adults, although cell phones did eventually make an appearance. Four 4-year-old girls make for an interesting “party”. There were plenty of tears, including Sydney’s and those of the girl sitting beside her while we were singing happy birthday; it was classic. I am so thrilled to have Sydney in my life. She is funny, bright, feisty, independent, cute… There is, however, nothing like the birthday of a child whose parent has died to make one contemplative.

There is a bittersweet-ness now to my girl’s birthday. There is a pensive tone to her birth story, now that her daddy is not here to share in the reliving and recounting of that day.

Syd was born with lungfuls of crud. She had a peaceful and happy home-birth, but couldn’t breathe properly, and continued to get worse as she lay with us. The midwives tried suction and kept her on oxygen, but after a couple of hours, gently guided me to the decision that she needed to be hospitalized. We went by ambulance. I recall shifting around on the bench in the back of the ambulance uncomfortably; they gave me a cushion to sit on, but it was challenging to go from pushing out a kid to sitting on a bench within a couple of hours. Sam insisted on coming in the ambulance with us. He was terrified about letting go of his new baby sister- it was very sweet and touching, and the ambulance attendants were very gentle and sweet with us.

The week that Sydney spent in the hospital was awful. I was terrified of losing her, but my job was to keep it together- falling apart comes after the crisis is past in my world. Besides, I had Sam to attend to from my hospital bed, and a husband who went into hypomania from the stress of a severely ill child. His other daughter, Hannah, was also hospitalized immediately after her birth, and at 18 months or so, was diagnosed with juvenile arthritis, which has never really gone into remission. It was an extraordinarily stress-full time.

The nurses in the intensive care neo-natal ward were awful, with very few exceptions. The attitude seemed to be “I love the babies; it’s the parents I can do without”. I had carried that kid inside me for 9 months, and being separated from her after her birth, and being told when I could be with her and what I could and couldn’t do with her, including holding her and nursing her, without sympathy for my angst and terror was one of the more awful experiences of my life. That said, I had a wonderful art therapist who helped me immensely through the post-partum depression, which was largely thought to have been precipitated by her near-death episode. The same art therapist was invaluable when Hannah moved to Vancouver, I got enraged, Willis got sick, and after he died. Yeah Linda!

Today, on her birthday, my aim was to be grateful for and joyful with my girl, especially as I am lately reading a heart-wrenching blog by a mother who lost her 5-year-old girl last summer. I try to be grateful that I got to share Sydney’s birth and the first years of her life with her daddy, as my friend Annie did not get to do with her Will. For the most part, I succeed in being grateful for the blessings in my life, but today, I also lament the loss of my husband and my little girl’s daddy.

Willis was a super daddy (all widows say that….). He was patient and playful and responsible and responsive. In many ways, he was a better parent than I. He would almost never lose his temper or raise his voice, and he had seemingly boundless energy. He adored both his girls, and his stepson, and I can only imagine how they will continue to miss him through the years.

Willis would have been in there like a goofy overgrown kid at the birthday party today, camera in hand, pushing past everyone else for an in-your-face shot that would have captured the moment perfectly. I miss that. I miss the genius of Willis. I miss the smell of him, and his overly loud laugh. What will the kids miss about him? Will having a loving step-dad present for the milestones in their lives fill in some of the gaps for Sydney and Sam? Willis was a step-dad to Sam, but Sam referred to him as dad. I’m not sure what their loss will look like over the years, and I hope that I can scrapbook with them a bit to help them remember when they need to remember.

Sydney talked about having the policeman bring Willis to her house for her birthday and put him on the couch for her birthday. Sigh. We talked a bit about his ashes, and how we could put the ashes on the couch if she wanted, but that dad couldn’t be brought back by a policeman to be with us again. Sigh. (I’m grateful she didn’t actually need us to follow through on this idea, because Willis’s ashes are still packed. I know they are in one of the boxes in the living room, but I’m not sure which box. The living room boxes will get unpacked when we get our new bookcases next week.)

Sydney’s birthday is almost the last of Rob’s and my “firsts” together. We have been together nearly a year, and what a year it has been. It has been interesting, and joy-filled, and tearful, by turns. In this last year, I “got” a new guy, a new family, and new house, and new car. We have a new rabbit, new furniture, new beginnings. I’m looking forward to this next year. I’m looking forward to these new things becoming old things. I’m on a roll here, in the last year, and I’d like the positives of the last year to be the ongoing theme in my life. I don’t really make resolutions, but a year full of joy and familiarity and not too much change would be a super thing.