Twelve years ago today, I doubled. I don’t just mean that in the ‘I weighed 98 pounds in June of 1997 and 205 on April 14th, 1998′ way, either, though that is also true, unfortunately for all of us, mostly my vertebrae.

The day I gave birth to you, you gave life to me. And I never saw it coming.

I had no idea that the moment I’d become someone’s mother, the moment I would look into the eyes that I could never imagine, no matter how hard I tried, that an entirely separate me would be formed. A me that would walk along side the old me, mending what was torn and gluing together what was shattered.

This other person, this mother of yours, she was an empty vessel soaking you in.

I drank in every drop of you, even the puke, but we’ll let daddy tell you that story someday. The me that was helpless against you, that shrouded herself in your eyes and your hands, your whimpers, your growth, your words and your breaths and your movements…she absorbed you whole, and eventually, everything about her became of you.

For 12 years, I have built up this person that I am becoming on the back of your falls and scrapes, your triumphs and victories, your strengths and your weaknesses. I have become the thing I imagine you want me to be. I have grown for you, because of you, along side you. Every breath you failed to take, I couldn’t take along side of you. Every drop of blood you’ve shed has poured out of my veins, too.

I have never felt anything in the world like I’ve felt you.

The old me, the one I hope you can’t remember anymore, used to have to dig holes in my skin to feel. I used to have to die, just so I could remember how to live. Now, all I have to do is say your name out loud, and I am flooded with the feeling of your fingers ripping against muscle and driving out through my skin, pushing so hard for exit from me that I could trace every little finger on the outside of my stomach. I am overtaken by the physical remnants of you inside my head and my heart, your footprints quite literally stomped into my soul.

I have this statue on our mantle, a tiny plaster casting dipped in bronze, perched atop a marble pedestal, of your two week old wrinkly, clenched fist. We took that casting while you laid, milk-drunk, asleep in my arms in the early days of May, 1998. Occasionally, when the house is quiet and there is no one around, I’ll take that down from the mantel and I’ll trace the curve of your fist, each little wrinkle, each dimple of your flesh, and if I try very hard indeed, I can feel you again. I can hold that tiny, perfect hand that I held onto so tight, for so long, warm again in my palm. I can call you back to my heart in an instant when I need to, and believe me…I need to more now than you’ll ever realize.

Today you turn 12 years old, and 12 is not so very old at all from where I’m sitting, but 12 is actually very much so grown indeed. My very first love, the boy who’s pictures still clutter the very darkest corners in the bottom of the wine crate that contains the tattered remnants of my history, that boy who still can make my heart flutter at the very thought of him, he was 12 when I met him. He was the same age you are today, and the imprint he left in my heart will never diminish. 12 is a powerful thing to be, because you can be you now. You can change someone else’s life. At your core, you are the person you are always going to be, no matter what mutation of you walks out of your teen years and into your adult life. The man peeking out from behind your eyes today…this is you, forever and ever amen.

I took your hand to cross a street the other day, as I will always do, and when your fingers wrapped around mine, it was unfamiliar, like grabbing your drink off a bar you’ve been at for entirely too long and realizing it isn’t your water, but someone else’s martini. The shock was jarring, and it hurt in a way I’ve never felt. I thought I’d felt ever pain there was, but this is indescribable frightening.

I catch a glimpse of you as I walk past your bedroom door, in your little man-cave, topless and distracted. I see you for a splinter of a second without a shirt on, and I realized that I can’t recognize that torso anymore. I can scarcely remember where I think there should be a birthmark, because your body has been yours for so long now, the idea of it ever being mine is foreign and icky, like wine-soaked snails for dinner.

You were never mine. You were always yours, ferociously, independently yours, and I was merely an extension of you. I have no doubt that you’ve known this all along, but as is your nature, you’ve allowed me my wide-eyed wondrous folly all these years. Your infinite patience for everything in this life (save your little brother) has been the greatest gift ever bestowed upon me.

This is a difficult thing for a mother to grasp, the finality of childhood. I need this version of me that has spawned from you. I need this person who has no choice but to live in humble admiration and unmitigated awe at the power you hold over me. I need to be reminded that I am weak, that I once was broken, and I need to remember what it feels like to have someone come into your life and physically take it over.

This love for you, it is the most basic, physical thing I have ever felt.

And then I get up in the morning and I slip on my flip-flops and I take your brother and sister to school and I sit at my desk all day and work, and then when it’s evening time, when I have all three of my gorgeous gifts back under my roof, screaming and pulling each others hair out, I slide off those flip flops and only then do I realize that I have been wearing your shoes, all day. And even though I was quite happy in them all day, the moment I take them off I realize that I am actually a little more comfortable all on my own.

You really can’t ask for better allegory than that, yo.

You made me better. You’ve protected me from a whole lot of shit I kept trying to step in. You made a complete person out of a shell that was given to you, labeled “mother”. You formed me from the ground up, and now it is time for me to stop taking from you and allow you to keep some of you for yourself. It’s time to give you your shoes back and let you walk where your life will take you. It’s time for me to put my own damn shoes on and walk beside you. From a distance.

It’s time for us to become our own people. I know you are ready. I know you were always ready. And even though I am tethered to you in a way you will not understand until you have a child of your own and you feel what I felt 12 years ago today, I think I am ready to let the me before you and the me since you start coming together. I think it’s time to soak the fiber of my being with the person that I have finally become, 2 parts me and 1 part you, shaken not stirred.

I think it’s time to open the door of this life that you have spent 12 years helping me build and start living in it. But don’t worry, kid, your room is right here, just like you left it.

Shrouded in the bleak grayness of winter’s final desperate push, under sterile florescent lights flickering in time with my breaths, you entered this world. Like a Hollywood movie showcasing the juxtaposition of the fight for humanity against the backdrop of war, you emerged chaotically, bloodied and bruised, weakened yet victorious. We welcomed you onto the battleground of your life; the floors soaked in my blood, the air thickened with dreadful anticipation, while the perfection of your face, your body, your heart and soul sucked the air out of the room and enveloped us all in a vacuum of pure wonder.

For the years’ worth of seconds that passed from the moment you exited my body and entered my heart, the world stopped spinning to welcome you. Deafening silence washed over all the whole of creation; the only sound left to be heard was the raging beat of your fierce heart. We spoke not a word to each other, and your cries were notably absent as we lost ourselves in the watery seas of your gaze, as you studied studied our features, as we all came to know each other on the most beautiful gray day in the history of mankind.

Two minutes later, you opened your mouth…and you haven’t closed it since. Bygones.

A decade has passed since the first day of our acquaintance, ten long years we have written the story of our lives together. I watch over you carefully as you become, I wash what it scratched and I mend what is broken the best ways I know how, and I hope that it is enough. I watch as you struggle for definition in an undefinable existence, and I try to remind you that the best way to find your way through darkness is by taking the hand of someone who’s already walked it. I see the same battle waging inside of you as did me a million years ago, grasping for a hold on a role you cannot comprehend, but recognize the need for.

What I will tell you today, now that you have entered the decade of your life that will see you become more than my son, more than my anything, is this: Your role is the most cherished one to me, your charge the most pressing in my life. You are the gravity that keeps my feet to the earth, the cement that keeps my walls standing around me, the air that begs me to breath in. You are the song that we all sing, the poem of our life. Even when you don’t make any sense at all.

Refrigerator.

You are the anthem of this family, the lost chords and the unsung verses forgotten in the dance from this responsibility to that appointment. You are the skip of our collective heart-beat, the pause that reminds us to live. You are the distraction from our distractions, the key to the doors of pure joy that we keep misplacing. You remind me that everything dreadful can be written down, folded up into a paper frog and jumped across the table. You teach me that there is nothing so solemn that a really good fart can’t make better. You point out to me that math is great and language is an art but there is power, pure, unadulterated magic, in a #2 doodle.

You remind me to put my hands on the walls of the boxes I’ve built to shelter myself and shove. You remind me that there is so much more that I don’t see because I forget it is there, between the lines, in that tiny gray area I try so hard not to touch. You remind me that even in the cold, dark, dreary days of life, there is unimaginable beauty, just waiting to be found, I just have to be willing to try. And I do try. I try to be better every day for you, I try to help you be unafraid of the person that you are, the mirror image of me. All the while, you keep showing me that I, that we…we are not something to be afraid of. We are divine grace, beautiful works of art, and that greatness lies before our very eyes so long as we are willing acknowledge that which we are, that which we can do.

Funny, it turns out that all I had to do was push.

Dear Edward,

I loved you from the first minute I saw you, which was really convenient for both of us because the very next minute, I became your auntie.

You were so little and sweet, open to anything, with all the love in the world to give. You are still that little boy smiling up at me and calling me auntie for the first time, except that now you’re a man. Today, this day, you aren’t our baby anymore. I’m going to be totally honest with you, since you’re all grown up and shit, yo; I’m not ready for this.

I’m not ready to watch you march off into this very big, very ugly world all alone. I worry that I didn’t tell you enough, enough of everything. I am afraid that you don’t really know what’s out there, and I’m mostly afraid that I won’t be there to catch you when you fall. And you will fall, a lot. I worry about how many ways you could fall; into drugs or into fatherhood or into ‘I’ll go to college after I take a year off’. Don’t take a year off, baby. I took “a year off” from seeing you and in that year you went from 3rd grade to graduating high school. It goes faster than you think it does, that year.

I look at you and I see power that knows no bounds and strength that most dying, old men will never know. I see destiny before me in the most beautiful little package, and I pray that you see it, too.

I pray that you tap that thing inside of you that makes you the fastest and the strongest and the funniest and the kindest of all god’s children. I dream that your dreams come true in the biggest way, and I dream that you don’t have to look as hard as I did, or as your mother did, to find them. I hope that these women in your life; me, your momma and your auntie, that we’ve shown you what the smallest of people can do when they put their heads down and reach for something with everything they have. I hope that we’ve been enough to fill the void your father left, that we’ve shown you that anyone can, and they can anything, no matter what life shits out in their path.

Mostly, I hope that you can look back on your childhood, the one that legally comes to a screeching halt today, and smile. I hope that you knew joy and love and happiness. I hope that we were able to give you that in plentitude, because it’s all we ever wanted to do.

You changed this family the day you were born. You changed my life the first time you took my hand. You made some of the hardest times of my life easier, you reminded me to laugh when it was too hard to breath. You made me strong and brave. You kept our whole family together when the walls were falling around us, you kept us sane when there was no sanity to be had, because we all believe in you. We’d all fight for you, we’d all die for you, but more importantly, we all live for you.

I want you to know that everything that comes, goes. That nothing is so hard, you can’t see it through to the other side, if you only try. I want you to know that every mistake can turn out to be a miracle if you’re willing to let it. I want you to know that you have decades before you have to anything. I want you to know that no amount of fame or money or pussy will replace laughter, that no promotion or accolade will replace an honest, tight hug. That no amount of anything can fill your heart like loving someone, and having them love you back, can. I also want you to know that love changes faster than the tides, it ebbs and flows, it comes to you and it pulls away and it’s never a loss when it’s gone, because it always leaves a scar in your heart.

I want you to know that scars are the only thing you’ll take with you out of this world, and I want you to cherish yours. They are the roadmap of your life; that football concusion, this surgery, that broken heart. Cherish everything, even what hurts, for every moment of your life is currency in the bank of your soul.

Don’t neglect your soul. Feed it well. Love passionately, love often, and every time you love, you will find you do it differently, for different reasons. Only by this will you know the true capacity of your heart. Eat what makes you feel good. Sometimes, you’re going to need a cheeseburger and the biggest coke they make. Get them. Sometimes, you’re going to need a salad. Get that, too. It doesn’t make you a sissy. And skip the brussel sprouts. They are gross and they don’t do anything for you that you can’t get in a Flintstone’s vitamin, and I’m sorry we’ve lied to you all these years and made you eat them anyway, ‘for your own good’. When you become a father, this particular brand of torture will be passed down to you.

Don’t become a father. Good god in heaven, don’t do it yet. You will spend the next 15 years feeling very grown, indeed, and very confident in every decision you make, and one day you’ll wake up and realize that you were wrong about almost everything. Allow yourself that margin of error to trip and fall, to dig holes and climb out of them. Give yourself the gift of discovering you. There is plenty of time to fall truly, madly, deeply in love, and fall right back out of it, and there is plenty of time to have a family. Until then, let us be your family. Let yourself hang on to this magic you live under the spell of. Children are the most amazing, wonderful, life altering gift we’re ever given in life, and they are motherfucking hard. And really expensive, but you already know that Mr I Only Wear Nike and Underarmour, now don’t you? Go to college, be broke and starve, read books and learn to shoot pool and drink beer and play football and kiss girls and grow just a little more, okay? Live YOUR life, the life you’ve earned. And put a damn condom on while you do it.

Aside: I just threw up a little. Let’s never say the word condom again, shall we?

But most importantly, remember this. No matter where you go or what you do, Team Edward is waiting in the wings, watching you more closely than you’d like, and we’re cheering with raucous voices for you. We will always hold your hand, and we’ll always lift you up, and we’ll always be there, waiting. Even when you can’t see us, even when you think there is no one in the world for you, we will always be there. You are the mortar that our family’s walls are built out of, you are our beacon bringing us all back home.

I’ve found that, as a parent, there are days when it becomes very important to be able to plainly, sincerely and most of all honestly lie my ass off to my kids.

Today was one of those days.

It wasn’t so much that Christmas is four days away, and it wasn’t so much that my grandfather died before I was born and I never knew him, just like my kids’ grandfather did. It wasn’t just that my other grandfather had some twisted, weird relationship with my father, and didn’t really have all that much of an interest in us, his grandchildren, and he died with that being the only thing I ever really knew about him. It isn’t exactly that my father and I have that same, weird relationship, or that he hasn’t seen or spoken to me or my kids in four years and three weeks. It isn’t even that he’s had, I’m pretty sure, four open heart surgeries in a decade, and I don’t know how many times the human heart will let you look at it before it melts your face off all Raiders-style.

What it is, I think, is that I have this thing for birthdays.

I didn’t care that I never had Christmas. I rather enjoyed laying under our car, waiting for the kids in the neighborhood to come egg our house because we didn’t give out trick-or-tricks, and grabbed their ankles right before they could toss their eggs at our windows, which scared the holy fuck out of them and made the whole lack of candy thing totally worth it for us. I always cared about the birthday thing, though. I always wanted to celebrate everyone’s birthday. It seemed like something that should be a big deal, something note-worthy at the very least. When I stopped being Insane Fundamentalist Judeo-Christian Girl, which is so totally a superpower, birthdays were my first indulgence in pure, unadulterated sin.

Turns out, there were funner sins to be had, most of them adulterated, but I still enjoy a nice birthday. And today was my father’s 60th.

Thirty years from now, when he’s long gone and I am the 60 year old, when I have grandchildren of my own and am staring down the business end of a life-span, what is ultimately going to matter to me? That I was right? That I made my point? More importantly, what is going to matter to my kids? What story will they carry with them of their grandfather, who is, in his own right, just maybe not so much as a parent but still, an amazing slice of human being? Will they tell their children that their mom’s dad just wasn’t that into her after all, and that he died before they could know him?

Do I want to pass on these cycles in my family, in my babies, or not?

These are things easier said than done. I preach about breaking cycles of abuse, of perpetuated victimization, but here I sit creating the exact same story that shades my past. I can say I’m “protecting” my kids from some mythical man who lives 3,000 miles away and never saw them much anyway, and I can create the memory of him that fits that, or I can realize that either way, it’s a created memory. Either way, your grandparents are not the people they are in real life. Grandparents are superheros. They wear big, red capes with G on them and they fly into your life and heal wounds with tea and beat off monsters with books and build bridges to your past out of the ether.

So today, I knelt down in my kitchen and I lied to my kids.

I told them that my issues with my father have nothing to do with them, that we’re both stubborn and old and dumb and that’s why he hasn’t called in four years, but that he’s 60 and there really couldn’t be any better gift to give their grandfather than them. That is was the right thing to do. That they didn’t need to stick up for me, because I’m just being an asshole anyway and this is all going to work itself out soon. And then I dialed his number and handed them the phone.

And then I smoked a pack of cigarettes outside while they talked to him inside.

The boys talked to him for almost an hour. They talked to him about what hot copy of what movie he’s got his hands on this week, about girls at school and the weather, about video games and new bands, and as I listened from the other room, I was 12 years old, sitting on my living room floor, talking to that same man from 3,000 different miles away about those exact same things all over again. He hung up without asking to talk to me, which stung, but he hung up with two very happy grandsons who smiled the entire night and planned what they were going to text him tomorrow, and bragged about his band, and giggled over his jokes, just like I remember doing some lifetime ago.

Today, I gave my father the greatest gift I could ever give anyone, the most precious thing to me in the whole world, for his 60th birthday present. Today, I gave my children permission to create their own stories and their own memories of their grandfather. Today, I gave our family a maybe. We’ll see where it goes.

This is the fourth draft that I’ve started for you today, and that seems only fitting, since it’s your fourth year of life that you’ve started today.

I don’t really know what to say to you, sugar. You don’t even really get what the whole “birthday” thing is yet, beyond the presents. You don’t actually know what birth is, come to think of it. You like to catch me fresh out of the shower and make me squeeze the sticky mulk out of my boooobeeees for you to see, and you know that babies drink milk from their mommas, but you don’t realize that you did, too. You know that babies can be in a momma’s tummy, and that one day they are out, but you haven’t put two and two together on that one just yet.

You have no idea that everything changed the day you were born. You don’t understand that events can change people yet, mostly because the grandest event in your life to date has had to do with an imaginary blue hedgehog. You don’t know that I am a person yet. Right now, I am your momma just like that leg is your leg or that doll is your doll. You still possess me, and you couldn’t understand that, once upon a time, you were part of my body, even if you wanted to.

You don’t understand that the photograph on the wall of your brothers and some weird, bald baby is you. It can’t be you. You are this big with that much hair, right momma? You don’t own that dress, so it can’t be you in the picture.

What is it is that you have no concept of the past. You can’t comprehend growth or age yet, so this arbitrary number that people keep throwing in your face today, sticking in your cake frosting, calling you and singing…none of it means anything. Your favorite number is two, so that’s how old you are. You don’t know what being two means, just that it feels good in your mouth to say.

What I want to tell you is that four years ago you defined me. That more than being their mother or his wife or her best friend, being your mother has been the most life-altering path I’ve ever walked. It’s not that I love you more than those people, it’s that the love is different. I look into your brother’s eyes and I see my heart. I look into yours and I see my flesh. It’s different.

It makes me understand, this having you, why the stories of god and creation being with the man and lead to the woman, bone of his bone, flesh of his flesh. I feel that when I look at you. I feel you under my skin and in my hair and coursing through my veins every second of the day, every day of your four years of life. Creation of woman is the most grand, crippling, powerful thing in the universe, and I did it just once. The further you grow from me, the more I feel the loss, because you are my very life. I gave it to you the day I bore you, wet and wrinkled, into your brother’s arms.

When I had your brothers, I learned how very wrong everything that my own brother and I survived was. I learned to hate those people who had hurt us so many times over, for so many years, and who continue to in their absence. Your brothers showed me that there is a natural order to things, an instinct that prevents people from torturing their young, and it showed me finally that it wasn’t me, it wasn’t us, it was them who were broken. Your brothers gave me walls of strength and reassurance.

And you tore all of them down.

I see you cry and I can’t for the life of me imagine what it did to the very souls of the people who made a hobby out of making my brother and me cry. I put bandaids on your boo-boos and I wince in pain with you, and I wonder what kind of monster you would have to be to rip flesh off of a child, just because you own a belt and you’re taller. I feel what it is like to be mother to a daughter, I am swallowed in the magnitude of this greatness thrust upon me, and I find myself feeling something I’ve never felt in my entire life…pity.

You’ve helped me to let go of my rage and my blood-lust for those people and pity them. I don’t want to forgive them, I don’t intend to forgive them, and I’ll never pretend to understand them but I’ve learned that I can feel sorrow for the loss of what they never really knew they had. They wasted their entire lives never once seeing what I see in your face every day. They’ve lived out their years never feeling what I feel every day in your arms.

And as for me? I can give all of that love, all of the touches and kisses and snuggles that I’d accumulated over those 17 years I spent trapped with those monsters and I can hand it all to you. I can give your every beautiful memory I imagined I’d have if things we just different. I can teach you to nurture, I can create a woman, I can right the wrong and make you stronger, better than I ever could have been anyway. I know that you’ve come to replace all the hurt and the hate that was beaten into my body, to fill that space, and I know that I’m okay with letting it all go for you. I don’t need it anymore, I just needed you.

You can bring silliness back to this home of very large, very grown people. You can remind us of quiet bathtimes and lavender lotions and plastic xylophone concertos. You can take the traditions I’ve created out of starlight and dust and keep them alive for our whole family. I watch my middle son take your face, hold you close to him and say goodbye to his little three year old, then tell you how excited he is to meet his big four year old in the morning, and I know that we are all okay.  I know that I’ve made it all right, that it’s all come full circle and I’ve not only broken the chain, I’ve made a brand new one for you. For all of you.

Thank you for that. Thank you for all of this. Thank you for giving me a soul again, and filling it up. I promise, I’ll guard it, and yours, and all of ours, with my very life.