The Big Oh-Four

“Do you have anything you’d like to say about Kai as a baby?”

This question was posed to me by Kai’s pre-school teacher during his birthday celebration, and between the tears and the lack of preparation for such a question, I was at a loss. Later, much later, I thought of so much. How he was whisked away after he was born to intensive care, and I craved having him back in my arms. How he loved to be swaddled, and we swaddled him way past the time when you’re supposed to stop. How he rolled over when he was only four weeks old, which was really his due date. How he had to lift his eyebrows to keep his eyes open. The lake of drool. The trail of Cheerios. That I used to nurse him while watching Sopranos, and now I can’t watch that show without thinking of nursing a baby in the middle of the night.

I brought birthday treats into the classroom. Gluten-free, casein-free treats. Because, you know. The autism thing, because maybe. We didn’t know at the time. I made fruit skewers, festively stuck into a pineapple so that the whole thing resembled a bouquet. Behold, pre-schoolers! The awesomeness of my creative mothering! I arrived during group time, and peeked my head in to watch the boy. They were clapping and singing a song. Even Kai. He seemed to know the words and what to do, pausing at appropriate places in the song to make faces.

“Let’s see a scary face!” said the teacher.

All the kids held up their monster claws and bore their teeth. “RAWR!” they roared.

“I said a scary face, not a scary noise,” she said.

All the kids held up their monster claws and bore their teeth. “RAWR!” they whispered.

Kai was dispatched to the bathroom to wash his hands before he helped pass out treats. Unfortunately, on the list of things that a newly-minted four-year-old will pass out to his friends with ease, you won’t find fruit skewers. The fruit slid off the top, and off the back, and Kai’s fat little fist couldn’t seem to find a good place to hold them. He took his dogged time though, passing a skewer to each of his friends. When the fruit fell off, he would pick it up off of the rug and put it back on the skewer, calmly and with great intention. A group of girls started to laugh when Kai missed a friend and then lost a piece of honeydew and had to work out how to fix both. He thought about it very carefully, even as the girls were laughing and trying to tell him what to do, replacing the melon and making sure everyone had a skewer. This is when I started to cry. Because he understood. And he wanted to get it right. And he was so cute. And so diligent. And because oh my God do I love that boy and he’s four and we’ve been fighting whatever he’s battling for so long and for once, I didn’t need to help him and I wondered if the girls’ laughter bothered him and, and, and, and.

So I was sobbing into a $10 fake pashmina I’d bought at the Miami airport, trying not to embarrass myself or my kid, and when the question came about Kai as a baby, I didn’t think I could even make my tongue work, let alone think of something to say. Like, when Kai was a baby, he ate a pint of blueberries and later pooped a perfect, blue turd. Or the time I had to call Poison Control when he ate some cat litter, and they asked for my zip code and it crossed my mind to give them a fake one. Or how we watched the pulse-ox numbers on the screen in the NICU go from 88 to 92 to 93 and back to 88, how that machine would sound an alarm when Kai went under 90, which was all the time. How we went to the hospital to take him home and they told us we couldn’t, and I had to make yet another trip home with an empty car seat and no baby.

As I sat there, Kai was singing the birthday song, and going through the motions of the Monetssori celebration. He held a globe and circled the sun (another kid holding a candle). He did this like he was a completely typical kid. The kind who asks “wh” questions and tells you about his day. Like he was any other kid without PDD and sensory issues and a gigantic expressive-receptive speech delay and possible ADD and ODD and whatever else DD. Later, he got to blow out the candle and after he did so, he looked up and shot me a huge grin.

Later, I went to Target and bought him a bunch of birthday presents, because, damn. That kid is so awesome.

And I wish I’d told the class about his love of jumping on the bed. How for his first Halloween, he was Yoda and I was Leia, and how his head was too big for the costume so I enlarged the yoda hat with a bunch of elastic. How he used to carry this wooden spoon with us everywhere he went. How he was so big that I got tendinitis in my wrist from carrying him, or that he used to sleep until 9:30 or 10 in the morning and all my friends were so jealous. How by the time he was one, he’d already been to Hawaii. There were all kinds of chickens running around the place where we stayed and Kai fed them Cheerios, and months later, we saw a bird in a park and Kai said, “Hi, Chicken! How are you?”

I could have said any of those things. But what I said was, after discreetly drying my eyes and clearing my throat and taking a steadying breath, the first thing that came to my lips. “He liked to tackle the cat.”