Twelve years is a long time

This time of year is always tainted by the bittersweet. The return to routine, letting go of the ease of summer, everything exploding, then disappearing like the spring-loaded touch-me-not seeds in the jewelweed clumps my brothers and I used to set off on our September walks to school. 

Twelve years ago on September 4, we welcomed little Jonathan Hayden into our lives. For years afterward, the anniversary effect of this event, coupled with the September 11 attacks and almost losing Hayden after his first surgery have made this time of year bittersweet. I wrote about it several years ago, here, and here.

But twelve years is a lot of distance between now and our baptism by fire into parenthood and the anxiety of raising a family in uncertain times. Twelve years later, I would say while our greater world is no more certain, things here have progressed to a point where I only see and feel the joy. I can still remember the dark, hissing pumping closet at the hospital, and how bewildered I was to find myself in there in a long dress and tights, what seemed appropriate attire for early fall but totally inapprorpiate for pumping milk for my baby living on machines in the next room. I remember seeing the footage on CNN while I was trying to negotiate this small dilemma, the jumpers from the burning World Trade Center, stick figures, really. And feeling numbness. I remember walking outside of the hospital, escaping for a brief breath of fresh air, and seeing the cabs by the UPenn with turbaned drivers and handmade signs in the back windows that read WE ARE SIKH, FROM INDIA. WE LOVE UNITED STATES. I remember all of this, but with distance and the luxury of hindsight. Twelve years is a long time. 

Today, Hayden is healthy. I no longer worry that the hospital will take him back, an irrational fear from the early half of his life. I sometimes Google anxiously, about the other shoe dropping, but mostly I try to just enjoy who he is and where we are, even in the face of world uncertainty. 

Hayden, Water Cay, 2013