Joy is Now

Tomorrow is Asher’s birthday. He’ll be four.

I had a moment the other day when I remembered his first birthday. On July 13, 2010, I woke up at the exact time he had been born, one year prior. I woke up so angry and sad. And I wrote about it.

I used to blog on another site. I stopped. I only just now realized that I wrote a post about his birth on that first birthday–and then stopped writing.

Here it is: Happy Birthday*

Asher was born really sick, with an extremely rare blood infection. The pain and grief of nearly losing him has had the habit of hitting me at weird moments through the years.

But when I read this old post for the first time in three years, I realized I knew the answer to the question it posed. Now. His birthday is now a time of joy. I don’t know when that happened. But I’m not mad anymore. And when he tells me, “Mommy, I wuv you like a goose wuvs a ninja,” I don’t associate that with that baby in the NICU.

It’s now.

*I am sharing this with the understanding that you probably shouldn’t read through the rest of my old blog. I try to avoid ever reading stuff I wrote in the past, with the assumption that it’s embarrassing and probably sucks. I don’t think I usually give my younger self a lot of credit, since I was, you know, young.