Why I must stop crying when he does amazing things (and why I know some very big words but prefer the very small ones)

My son made me cry last night when I put him to bed. I must stop crying when he does amazing things.

The first time this happened he was only 10 weeks old and all he did was smile. It was his first smile and it meant everything. Poor little guy must have wondered what he’d done wrong .

I will go back a little further, before I go forward. My son had a very traumatic birth. He got stuck on the way out, needed resuscitation and spent the first 25 days of life in the NICU (neonatal intensive care unit). We had to very quickly (and unexpectedly!) learn very long new words like “shoulder dsytocia”, “Hypoxic Ischemic Encephalopathy”(HIE), “birth asphyxia”, “basal ganglia”, “intubation” etc etc. (And at this point I won’t even go into all the other words we’ve had to learn further down the track, including most significantly “athetoid cerebral palsy”.).

Wind forward to his 10 week old first smile. After 10 weeks of watching medical experts look sideways at our son every time he moved for signs of abnormality (whatever that means!), his smile was the sign I had been looking for. And as soon as he smiled, I cried. The first of many times I would cry at something amazing.

So last night, I was putting him to bed and I told him I loved him. And for the very first time, he responded with a full sentence. The words were not perfectly formed (he has very limited control of many consonants, but growing control over his vowel sounds), but they were unmistakable. It was his first ever sentence and the words were “I love you mum”. I didn’t let him see me cry this time, but when I went to the loungeroom, I told my husband that he’d made me cry. He asked if he’d given me another black eye (he’s a wobbly fella and sometimes gets a bit over excited and I have copped more than one black eye or bruise from an out of control body part, usually his noggin). But nope, all he did was speak.

It wasn’t a big deal to him, and I really must stop crying when he does amazing things or he’s going to grow up thinking his mother is a basket case.