Happy Birthday, 2013...!

Dear Nick, I'm not an articulate man anymore. I used to be, I think. Maybe I will be again someday. I don't feel like I am at this moment. Eight years ago, at 7:45 in the evening, you were presented to me like a tightly wrapped little loaf of bread, seven pounds, five ounces. Not bad for a little kid with a heart defect and Down syndrome. You hair was long and stringy and ginger colored. You were so late in coming your hair looked like it was chemically burned from soaking in wombjuice. Your little eyes were wide open and astonishingly blue and we just gazed at each, expressionless, for what certainly was only a minute or two but which felt much longer. Looking back now, I can still remember the look on your face. It was indifferent. It was a look that said, "What are you gonna do for me?" Well, that was the question. As for the answer to that question, it's: I don't know. I love you, Nick. You've taught me more in our short time together than I learned in my entire life up to your birth. You've taught me about courage, and love, dedication, and sacrifice. Pride, shame, hope, despair, frustration, forgiveness, freedom, guilt. I haven't slept a single night in peace in over eight years. My hair's going gray. I'm stooped and tired from hoisting you all the time. I've developed a stutter from biting back shouts of angry curses. My life feels like a jail cell and I'm too much of a coward or an idiot to do anything about it. I dread waking up in the morning. My toils are Sisyphean and my loneliness is glacial. What have I done for you. Is that a question, or by its construction does it present its own answer. For the first two years or your life I never left your side. I read to you constantly. Books, newspapers. I strolled you around everywhere. I massaged your palate, drove you to therapy, fed you, helped you learn to turn over, to crawl, to sit up, to go from prone to sitting. I fed you late at night so that your little body would start to thrive. Unwrapping you for your feeding, I was always greeted by a little puff of warm Nickyair, like the smell of fresh bread. How uninterested you were regarding the bottle. I would jiggle the nipple in your mouth, stroke your cheek, scrape your soles, press a wash cloth to your face to wake you so that you would eat. There's more and more. Eight years later, you're a good boy, a sweet kid, that acts like a real jerk sometimes. You can be swooningly loving, grindingly annoying, and infarction-inducing infuriating. But you try hard and want to please and the world is not a kind place to kids like you and I want to protect you but I don't know how, so I just try to do my best. I just try and fail and try and fail. Who knows if I'm doing anything right? Love, Dad