Twenty six years ago last night, Jay and I were in Jamestown, North Dakota, at a Christmas party at the home of Jay's boss, Mike Olsen, the athletic director of Jamestown college, where Jay was in the first year of his first job as a college head coach.

Lots of info in that sentence, yet none of it pertinent to the story.

Yes, we were in Jamestown.  But what I didn't tell you, what nobody knows yet, is that I was over nine months pregnant.

My due date was the 14th.  Like most first timers, when my due date came and went, I simply assumed I would be pregnant forever.  That's right; it was all a cruel joke perpetrated by Mother Nature, that bitch! and that I, formerly svelte and athletic, was doomed to spend the rest of my life waddling about like an arthritic blimp.

So we went to a Christmas party at the home of Jay's boss.

Where my water broke all over their living room couch.

EEEEEWWWWWW!!!!

Didn't see that one coming, did you?

Well, you should've; all good pregnancy stories start messy and end messier.  And for all you guys who read that sentence and thought "No!no!no! Women's stuff!  Ickyickyicky, must gouge out eyes before reading another word!"; grow up.  You guys all have your fun, telling your gross out stories of drunken bacchanals involving puking and soiling yourselves and you laugh and laugh....well, man up, suckers.  We gals have our own gross out stories and they out gross yours by a...gross.  It just kills you that we can do something big and important that you can't do, when the only things you can do that we can't are silly, like peeing on a tree.  Even if we could do that, we wouldn't.  And don't send me any links to stories of the pregnant 'man'.  She's not a man, she's a chick with a beard.  Here's a tip; if it's got a uterus, it's a female.  For crying out loud, I can put on button fly jeans and cowboy boots but it doesn't make me John Wayne.

Well that was an interesting tangent, wasn't it.

Back to the past...Jay and I stayed at the party long enough for him to open his present, before we headed to the hospital to meet our future  ohmygod, I just Carrie Bradshawed!!  I loved the show Sex and the City, but come on!  That girl was the worst writer ever.  Cutesy the Twat should've been beaten to death with her own laptop.

 Anyway... Jamestown is small so it took us all of ten minutes to run home, grab my night bag and get to the hospital.  We checked in at about 10:30 and Tyler Patrick was born around 3:00 a.m.  That's remarkably quick for a first timer, but in my family, slow as molasses.  My Mom has nine kids and I had already logged more cumulative hours in labor than she ever would.

Somewhere in the middle of it all, Jay decided that that was it; he could never put me through such an ordeal again.  Yeah, that worked out.  Have you met our three other kids?

Having babies is amazing.  When you  are in the thick of it, you swear nothing could possibly be worth the trouble.   Then, at the height of the awful, they hand you the most wonderful, awesome, fascinating and beautiful thing you've ever seen, felt or imagined; your own child. 

The world literally changes. 

Okay, the world doesn't change, the world doesn't even notice.  Here's what's important;  You change.

Suddenly you realize that the most important person to ever live has been born and incredibly enough has been entrusted to you.  There are no instructions, no manual.  If you are very lucky, you grew up in circumstances that prepared you a little bit.  If you are smart, you embarked on this enterprise with someone equally committed to the outcome.  All you know for sure is that love at first sight is real and this squirming, squeaky person in your arms is someone you would walk through fire or take a bullet for.

His first word was "ball". 

Long before he could walk or talk, Ty would sit in front of the tv set and watch basketball with his Dad.  He never took his eyes off the ball. 

We moved to Montana a few months before his third birthday.  By the time he was four, his Dad let him come to the gym and hang out during practice.  One lovely spring day, before Ty started school, we were out in the driveway and he was shooting freethrows on his four foot plastic hoop.

"Hey Mom!  Know what I say when I miss a freethrow?" he asked me.

"No, Ty.  What do you say?"

"I say 'oh fuuuuuck!'"

That was the day he learned that what happens in the gym stays in the gym.  When we were growing up, we had a sailboat.  Dad would tolerate sailor talk on the boat, but not on the dock.  Same thing here.

If it had been up to me, Tyler would never have been allowed to do anything out of my sight.  It was Jay who convinced me to let Tyler and Katie walk the four blocks to the ice rink at Lake of the Isles when they were five and seven.  I stood at the window and watched the spot where they'd disappeared around the corner until they came back, two hours later.  It was Jay who convinced me to let Tyler roller blade from our house near Lake of the Isles to Gramma's house on Lake Harriet when he was nine.  I made him carry identification and call me from my folk's house the second he got there.  It was Jay who got Ty the job as ballboy with the Timberwolves when he was in seventh grade, and Jay who decided Ty could catch a bus from his school to the Target Arena downtown.  Boys need Dad's to grow up to be men.  Don't ever let anyone tell you otherwise.

In the blink of an eye, that's what happens.  They grow up to be men.  I miss that skinny, excitable, energetic little boy with the huge blue eyes.  Sometimes it makes me sad to know that he's gone and he's never coming back.  But the truth is that every year he becomes more of the kid that I love.  Yes, the bouncy baby boy is gone but in his place is one of my favorite people of all time.  On the one hand, I'm sad that he's so far away but on the other, I'm happy and proud that he's out in the world, making his own way, making his own choices and taking responsibility for himself. 

I could not possibly be any prouder of him.

Happy birthday, kid.

 

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