December and Time

by Julia Buckley
Forty-five years ago this month my mother gave birth to me. There we are--my mother a glamorous 1960s gal, and me a little bundle in footy pajamas. (Yes, my mother dressed up around the house. Look at those stockings! I wonder if my children will reminisce about my sweats? Or on special occasions, sweats with a racing stripe?)

I was my mother's fifth and last child. My siblings suggest that I was babied all my life, although I never felt that I was. (That will have to be a whole other post--birth order and psychology, or some such thing).

I can't say that babyhood feels like just yesterday. Yet it also feels odd to be an almost 45-year-old person, simply because when you're twenty and thirty, you never think you'll be 45. A similar illusion to thinking you'll never die, I suppose.

30 years after I was born, on this very day in December, I had my first child. As you can see, he was a sweet little fellow, and he still is, under the standard teen veneer of sarcasm and know-it-allness. I asked him how he would like to celebrate his 15th birthday. He is already immersed in one of his early presents: a mini laptop--a no-frills affair that his mom got on sale--which will probably now become the center of his universe. He shrugged and said that he'd like a couple more things to open, and he'd like to go out for dinner. This I can handle. Yet it seems there should be something more to herald this occasion--trumpets or fireworks or something. My baby is fifteen, and before I know it he'll be in college.

I remember my mother having similar moments of prescience. I would catch her, back when I was in high school, watching me as I ate my bowl of cereal, or studying me when I overslept in the morning. "What?" I'd say irritably.

"You look like an angel when you sleep," she'd say.

"Yuck. I drool, and my mouth hangs open."

My mother would sigh, (as I sigh now when my son claims that everything is boring or dumb. "Boring as balls," is his favorite simile, but apparently balls are metaphorically flexible, because his last English test was "as easy as balls." Whatever that means. Mostly he just wants to say "balls.")

"You used to be such a sunshiney person," she would say. What she didn't say was that she hadn't recovered from me hitting the teen years and becoming Dorothy Parker overnight.

"I'm still sunshiney," I told her. "Underneath."

We made it through the teen years, my mother and I, and she considers me sunshiney once again. Now our biggest problem is distance, and her yearning for the time when her children were all around her. I can already feel the pangs of that future fate. It's not so evident yet, except in my son's growing social life--his private phone calls and his not-so-subtle clicking out of Facebook if I happen to wander into the room. (Not that I can't see what he was typing--I am his Facebook friend, after all). :)

Every December brings a revelation--my son becomes a year older, I become a year older, and we move farther and farther from my mother's youth, my youth, the snows of yesteryear. I love December for the celebrations it brings, but December is a reminder, as well, of time's relentless passage.

Still, it is beautiful to me, because it binds my son and me together--the month of our birthdays, always 30 years apart. It will be easy for him to remember no matter what age I am, I tell him. Easy as balls. :)

Happy Birthday to my son Ian, and Merry Christmas to you all!