![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.katrinakenison.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/12\/henry1.jpg?resize=639%2C426\" "\\"henry\\"")
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Henry, twenty-one years ago today I gave birth to you, and nothing was ever the same again.\u00a0 This morning we called you early, to say \u201chappy birthday,\u201d and to marvel at the fact that you\u2019re all grown up.\u00a0 You have two more finals to take before you get to board that bus for the airport and catch a flight home for Christmas.\u00a0 And we won\u2019t get to go out to Harlows for that legal drink I promised you till Tuesday night.\u00a0 But all day I\u2019ve been thinking about that bitterly cold morning twenty-one years ago, when you arrived on the planet, all six pounds of you, and turned me and your dad into parents.\u00a0 The transformation was profound. Whatever, whoever, we\u2019d been the day before — well, we could barely remember that innocent young couple, so intensely focused were we on the astonishing fact that we had suddenly been blessed with a baby, with a brand new life, placed into our humble, unschooled hands.\u00a0 Were we up to the job?<\/p>\n
\u201cA child is born!\u201d proclaimed a sign alongside the road as we drove you home from the hospital just three days before Christmas.\u00a0 Yes! I thought, and began to cry at the enormity of it all.\u00a0 Little did we know that the combination of exhaustion and hormones and joy and wonder would produce a river of tears over the next days — every Christmas carol and newspaper headline and tiny baby gift brought me to my knees.\u00a0 We dressed you up in a red velvet Santa suit and passed you around to each\u00a0adoring family member on Christmas day, marveling all the while at what we had wrought — you!\u00a0 Since that day that you found your way out of my body and into my arms, you have led me to just about every place I\u2019ve needed to go; the spiritual journey that is motherhood began for me in the moment I gazed into your eyes for the very first time, and it continues now, as I learn to trust your wings, to have faith that we have given you all we can and that you are ready to fly.\u00a0 So much of what I know about being a mother I learned from you — how to love without condition or expectation, how to believe in the rightness of things as they are, when to push and when to wait, when to trust my inner knowing and when to ask for help, when to hold tight and when to let go.<\/p>\n
In a few days, you\u2019ll walk through the door, dump your bags upstairs, open the piano, play something from the Christmas song book, and then, surely, something I\u2019ve never heard before.\u00a0 I\u2019ll try to keep my cool, try not to get all mushy on you.\u00a0 But I can\u2019t fool you.\u00a0 You know I can\u2019t wait for that moment to arrive, for your music to fill the house and for our family to be gathered again under one roof.\u00a0 Happy birthday Henry, and hurry home — we\u2019ve got the tree decorated, the lights in the windows, all our favorite books piled up in the living room.\u00a0 But Christmas won\u2019t really start till you get here.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Henry, twenty-one years ago today I gave birth to you, and nothing was ever the same again.\u00a0 This morning we called you early, to say \u201chappy birthday,\u201d and to marvel at the fact that you\u2019re all grown up.\u00a0 You have two more finals to take before you get to board that bus for the airport […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":15183,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,6,8],"tags":[173,301,324],"class_list":{"0":"post-285","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-hearth-home","8":"category-holidays","9":"category-parenting","10":"tag-faith-2","11":"tag-motherhood","12":"tag-parenting-2","13":"entry"},"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/katrinakenison.com\/new\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/10\/600x600.png?fit=600%2C600","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/katrinakenison.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/285","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/katrinakenison.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/katrinakenison.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/katrinakenison.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/katrinakenison.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=285"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/katrinakenison.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/285\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/katrinakenison.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/15183"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/katrinakenison.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=285"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/katrinakenison.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=285"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/katrinakenison.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=285"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}