Free Love + Family: The Birthday by Ashley Barron Page A

husband and I can pull into their lives.
     
    I want them to have options, always.
     
    The noise from my son’s pleading pulls me
back to the present. I look at my daughter, still standing
expectantly in front of me.
     
    “You’re right. I do love you.” I can’t resist
tugging gently on her hair before turning to my son. “And that is
why, after this performance, you can add another month to the wait
time for that video game.”
     
    He falls dramatically to the floor,
punctuating the drop with heavy groans of displeasure.
     
    I laugh.
     
    There will always be laughter in our
home. Despite the ribbing we took from our family and friends,
my husband and I added those exact words to our wedding vows. At
the time, we’d had no idea how complicated it would be to honor
such a simple statement; we were young, in love, and everything was
possible.
     
    At least, that’s what we tell ourselves.
     
    There have certainly been periods when we’ve
worried, both individually and as a couple, that laughter had left
the sturdy walls and bright green lawn that anchor our space in
this world.
     
    Too often, it’s simpler to light the fuse of
anger—somehow always within reach—than to commit the energy and
hard work it takes to pull smiles and laughter out of hiding at the
end of a long day.
     
    After our vows were said the challenges had
begun almost immediately, pushing and straining against our utopian
ideals of marriage, and the future. Being madly in love with one
another hadn’t seemed to count for as much as we thought it would,
surprisingly. We hadn’t been prepared for just how quickly two
people become overwhelmed once the ink on the mortgage dries and
the pressure of merging two extended families sweeps through,
uninvited.
     
    At the precise moment my husband and I
believed we’d finally achieved balance between our respective
families, we conceived a child.
     
    That one act turned our own parents into
unruly children.
     
    Suddenly, every minute of our lives, every
morsel of our love, had to be equally divided between the two
families. Competition would spring up in the oddest, most
inconvenient and annoying places. I didn’t need the stress, not
when my body was changing and my emotions were constantly leaving
me with tear-streaked cheeks.
     
    After a while, I’m not even sure all the fuss
between our parents was about the baby. I think the competition
morphed into a battle for world domination or head cheerleader.
     
    At least poorly behaved children could be put
in a timeout. But ill-mannered parents? There wasn’t a thing my
husband and I could do except to wait it out.
     
    All things considered, I suppose that period
in our lives was good practice for when our son and daughter become
teenagers. I’m only just beginning to accept how close they are to
that complicated transformation.
     
    How can they be this old, already?
     
    Ten years ago, on the night our son pushed
his way into this world, tiny and helpless, holding our hearts in
his newborn hands, my husband and I found a new closeness.
     
    When the nurse settled all seven pounds,
eight ounces of him into my trembling arms, I knew what it was to
hold a miracle in my very own hands.
     
    My husband had been sitting on the bed beside
us, his body shaking with emotion, his head so close to mine his
tears rolled down my cheeks.
     
    “Our child,” he had whispered.
     
    It was my eyes, he would say, years later.
The way I had looked at him as I sat there with our first-born
cradled against my chest had delivered the precise coordinates of
his new place in this world.
     
    And what was the name of that new place?
     
    Fear.
     
    We were terrified, the two of us—and for all
the right reasons, mind you. After five years together, a handful
of hours on a narrow hospital bed had transformed us from couple to
family.
     
    Once we had weathered the first few months of
being new parents, we were more determined than ever to ride out
the pop-up