Born at the Right Time

I always pictured myself with four children. And in a sense--a very limited sense, but true to me--I had four children, and the Girl Child is the youngest of those.

We lost two between the Boy and the Girl--long before birth, but there's a space left in your life forever, a hyphen without a following clause. The Husband calls it "a little Forever hole."

And then she came along ...

Her eyes as clear as centuries
Her silky hair was brown

She has never been an easy child, but she always slept. As an infant, she would scream for 4 hours a day, then pass into blissful sleep, waking 6-8 hours later. She can sleep anytime, anywhere. We have dozens of pictures to prove this point.




In the weeks after she was born, I couldn't identify with her. One evening in 2002, I sat on our bed after one of the early four-hour crying sessions, staring at her--lying peacefully asleep among the pillows--and sobbing uncontrollably. I contemplated giving her up for adoption to a family that would love her as much as she deserved. The feeling didn't go away overnight. Eventually we settled into each other, but as her father's child, she remains foreign. Her brother is like me: dry, perfectionistic, intellectual, unyieldingly fair-minded, volatile. She is lively, daring, empathetic and imaginative. She's the extrovert in a family of introverts who usually overwhelmingly want her to just shut up.

Never been lonely
Never been lied to
Never had to scuffle in fear
Nothing denied to

Being an oldest child, I never quite understood the poignancy of the youngest. I always thought my parents loved the Shrimp more than me; but I realize now that what I perceived as favoring was something more akin to savouring the last drops of a sweet liqueur that you know you will never taste again.