Birthdays and Owls 🦉

Wednesday night we celebrated Cooper's 11th birthday.

As I watched him smile and blow out his candles, I remembered the night I went into labor with him.

At the time, we were living in Washington, D.C., and my husband Jake and I had one car between us.

Jake's new job was for a small government in Maryland, and he needed me to pick him up from a city council meeting that ended long after dark.

But I got lost, my cell phone died, and I had no way to plug it in to see where I needed to go.

Just as I was starting to get anxious and scared, I saw a HUGE owl swoop down and land on a telephone poll and stare straight at me.

As I looked in the owl's direction, I noticed a major street behind it and used it to find my way back to a part of the city I recognized. I picked up Jake and we headed home.

Two hours later I went into labor with Cooper, and he was born a couple days after that.

(The labor story itself is for another time - but suffice it to say it started with our car breaking down in a snowstorm, forcing us to hitchhike to the hospital, and ended in an emergency c-section.)

But I always remembered the owl.

And after a few months had passed I looked up the symbolism of owls and saw that they often represent "death."

This scared me then, but makes more sense to me now.

Cooper's arrival was indeed a harbinger of a certain type of death, just not the kind I feared then.

None of us literally died. But over the next several years, my identity, my ego, and my understanding of and expectations for life all did. 

Cooper's PDA brought all this about.

It's what made him a baby I could never soothe - preventing me from feeling like a capable mother.

It's what forced me to leave my career - erasing all the painstaking work I'd done to get through a PhD program and into professional research.

And it's what made me stop believing that I had any real control over how my life would go - sapping the comfort that I took from this notion and leaving a void behind.

But when I look back now, 11 years later, I see all the ways I've been reborn.

The path that Cooper's PDA - and now his little brother's, too - forced me onto is not what I ever expected.

And I won't sugar coat it - our journeys as parents of PDAers are harder than most.

But I do now know that I am a very capable mother, that I have a career I can take pride in, that I can trust my intuition, and that by accepting my lack of control I gain freedom.

These are the things I wish for all of you, too.

And they are what I've been fortunate - through my new career - to see many of you achieve.

So please consider this note one of congratulations and motivation. 

None of us are alone on this journey.