Four Years

So, the thing is... a lot can happen in four years.

We celebrated Ana's fourth birthday this week. Four years. Four years on this earth, plus the better part of one in the making. I've been mooning a bit over her this week and she, with the unerring killer instinct of a preschooler, has been a perfect little demon. How do kids know when we're about to go all mushy over them? And how do they make the leap from that to, say, flushing an entire roll of toilet paper down the commode?

Four years. You can get an entire college education in four years (theoretically.) You can make history as a president or other elected official. You can represent your country at the Olympics. But you would be hard pressed to equal the accomplishments of a child in the first four years of life. It's a big birthday, really. It marks the end of infancy and toddlerhood and marks the beginning of so many other things.

On Ana's birthday, I always think back to where I was on the eventful day when she was born: gargantuanly pregnant and packing up my office on my last day of work. That, in itself, is mind-boggling --I have now been out of the work force for four YEARS. Wow. At this point, I could no longer do my old job. For one thing, I could never again devote the endless hours and single-minded focus that my job required. No way. My days of breakfast, lunch, and dinner (and midnight snack) at the office are over. No job will ever be that important to me again. But gosh, I would also need some kind of refresher course if I had to enter the work force again. With technological advancements happening at such an incredibly fast rate, I'd need to be brought up to speed! I feel a tiny sense of loss over this, actually. I was really good at my job and I knew it. Now the jury seems to be permanently out about my job performance. In the back of my mind, I think I've kept re-entering the workforce as an option if this motherhood thing doesn't work out. But it's a different world than it was four years ago.

Anyway, I packed up my office and went home and called my doctor and told him I thought, but wasn't quite sure, that my water had broken. Naturally, he wanted to see me so just in case, I packed my bag for the hospital. My husband laughed at me but he came home to take me to the doctor anyway. (Can you tell this was our first child?) We saw our doctor, who ran a few tests, the last of which required waiting 45 minutes for the results. So we headed over to the golf shop and my spouse bought a new driver (on sale) and we came back and parked in the fifteen-minute parking space, so sure were we that we would be sent home. And we WERE --some three days later, with a brand-new little roommate and a world that would never look the same.

Overnight, it seemed that everything had changed. I felt like I had all new skin --this fragile, tender, new skin. I stepped gingerly and carried my little baby cradled inside my very being. But it was frightening to be so vulnerable. Suddenly news stories made a deeply personal impact and if they dealt with the injury of a child, I was as distressed as if it were my own. During the Balkan crisis, I had to stop watching the news altogether --I simply couldn't stomach the cruelty of people to each other. Something changed for me forever --now I can't just read the news dispassionately. I think about the fact that every person, good and bad, was once a child loved by SOMEONE-- diapers changed and tiny fingers kissed and sweet-smelling baby neck nuzzled. I felt like I understood some small glimmer of the concept of Grace and unconditional love. It is the transition to Motherhood from the selfish and self-contained person I had been up until then, although I didn't know it at the time. I just felt... new and oddly fragile.

It was odd, too, to feel that ferocious love and protectiveness for such a tiny baby. I would so gladly have given my life for hers. I had fantasies during which I would do heroic things, like lifting entire cars or rushing into a burning building to save her. But the harder question was still before me: could I give Ana the day to day --the diaper changes and the cold medicine and the time outs? Well, I still don't quite know the answer to that but I am trying. Four years.

Time passed and we both grew. Ana got teeth and learned to talk and crawl and walk and then tap dance. She learned to use the potty and to eat with silverware and to read. I learned that nothing ever turns out that way I think it will but despite my many mistakes, love seems to cover a multitude of sins. I became more reflective and (despite my husband's claim to the contrary) more patient, and kinder, I think. I started to feel a connectedness to the world that I hadn't felt before and some kind of deeper spiritual sense of time and the cycles of life.

At some point, I got my sense of humor back. Gosh, I was so deadly serious that first year! But gradually, I began to relax a little and in a weird counter-intuitive trend, Ana grew more adventuresome and confident. She started school and play dates away from my watchful eye and all that is as it should be. Now she's four and racing up and down the driveway on her new two-wheeler and my only words of caution to her have to do with running over her little sister. We've found a good groove, my little four-year-old and I. I still love her more than my own life and the bad news stories still give me pause but we can't live our lives trying to avoid potential danger. We strap on our helmets and we pedal with all our might, you know?

A lot has changed in these four years. Happy Birthday, Ana Katherine.

And thank you.

"None of us knows what the next change is going to be, what unexpected opportunity is just around the corner, waiting a few months or a few years to change all the tenor of our lives." Kathleen Norris, Hands Full of Living

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Barbara Cooper is the mother of Ana (FOUR) and Jane (17 months). She lives in Austin, Texas and, due to an exclusion of the "Baby Bath Wrestling" event, she did not compete in the 2002 Winter Olympics.