Firstborn’s birthday stirs many memories
It was love at first sight 26 years ago today.
No, I did not meet my husband; I met our firstborn son.
Nothing can prepare you for that free fall into love (for sure not those mechanical dolls my co-worker said her junior-high daughter brought home last week).
I was never the girl who loved kids and couldn’t wait to have babies. After being married a little over a year, the maternal instinct hit me, and I got pregnant almost immediately.
It was an easy pregnancy until it got crazy. When I was seven months pregnant, I went into early labor with him and had to be whisked by ambulance to a hospital for a few intense days, then was sent home with orders to lie around until he was born.
When it happened for real, I was on the couch watching Unsolved
Mysteries, and my water broke. It was showtime. Just 3 1/2 hours later, John David Keith was born and put in my arms, and I started humming a song I’d hummed while I was pregnant, and he stopped midcry.
In some ways, he was an easy baby — he didn’t cry a lot, but he woke up every 1 1/2 hours forever, it seemed, to eat, fall asleep; eat, fall asleep. I started hallucinating from lack of sleep. I basically sat and held him for my nine weeks of maternity leave, and I don’t regret a second of it. Now he’s 6-4, and it’s hard to believe I ever held him on my shoulder.
He also was an easy kid to raise, for the most part. Stubborn, he was. Stubborn, he is. We battled about things that didn’t matter, now that I look back (his Power Rangers shoes really were fine for kindergarten orientation), but others that did (I didn’t care that he was the only one of his 14-year-old friends wearing a bicycle helmet).
He was always the leader in his group. Teachers loved him — he was quiet, polite, a good student. He did not inherit my type-A, loud personality. I distinctly remember him telling me not to interrupt his baseball coach, and he still shushes me when I get too loud in public. He always hung back until he figured out the lay of the land. He stayed calm in chaos. He was mature beyond his years. I let him fly to Austria by himself when he was 16 to visit a cousin, and I knew he could handle it.
He became a passionate duck hunter and a good golfer, two passions I’ve supported, even if I don’t share them.
John did get my and my husband’s work ethic. He worked every summer in high school, in jobs from fast food to construction, and he is a dependable employee. He’s a talented writer, too, but after an internship in outdoor writing, he decided journalism wasn’t his calling. He’s been in sales since graduating from college, and although he isn’t a big talker like his mother, he has a real knack for sales.
The past year has been a big one for him — for all of us. He got married to a wonderful girl a year ago in October, and my big strong boy
cried when he saw his bride in her wedding dress. He is a good husband, just like I knew he would be. I admire him in so many ways.
My husband pointed out that our son is 26, the same age I was when I had him. I’ve been his mother half my life. I’m 52 — and someday, maybe I’ll be a grandmother.
I hear that’s love at first sight, too.
Senior writer Tammy Keith can be reached at (501) 327-0370 or tkeith@arkansasonline.com.