15 FEBRUARY 2001
BETHESDA NAVAL MEDICAL CENTER
BETHESDA, MARYLAND

Sarah’s asleep, so I slip away to visit the nursery, marveling as I have for the last twenty hours over the two perfect little creatures that we’ve brought into this world.  My daughter’s asleep, but Matt is wide awake, his eyes darting around as if he’s trying to take everything in.  After checking my armband and giving me a gown to put over my clothes, the nurse on duty lets me into the nursery to hold him. 

As she warms up a bottle – Sarah had pumped some milk earlier today, both so that I could participate in feedings and due to the occasional logistical issues of feeding two, as she found out last night – I cradle my little boy in my arms, memorizing his tiny features.

The nurse returns, holding the prepared bottle out to me.  As I take it, she says, “Sir, there are a couple of people here to see the babies.  They say that they’re your parents.”

I look up, seeing Mom and Dad standing outside the window to the nursery.  I recognize the look in their eyes.  It’s the same one that Sarah and I have had for the last twenty hours, marveling that our children are finally here.  I turn back to the nurse, nodding.  “Yes, they are,” I confirm.  “Is it okay for them to come in here?”

“Of course, Sir,” she says.  “We can give them armbands like yours so that everyone knows that they’re authorized access.  If you’re okay here, I can go help them get suited up.”

“We’re fine, Lieutenant,” I say.  “Thank you.”  I may not have spent much time around babies in my life, outside of my godchildren, but my son and I are good right now.

After a few minutes, Mom and Dad join me, and I can tell they’re just itching to hold their grandchildren. “I’m glad the weather finally let up enough for you to make it to the hospital,” I tell them, shifting slightly in the rocker so that they can get a better look at Matt.  “At least you didn’t try to make it yesterday in that weather.”

“It was hard not to,” Dad admits.  “We wanted to see the babies so much.”

“I can’t believe that they’re finally here,” Mom says in wonder as she lifts a tiny hand, letting his fingers curl around one of hers.

“I know,” I say, remembering Sarah’s complaints the last few weeks about her pregnancy dragging on, especially since everyone had warned her that twins *always* come early. It’s hard to consider six days as early.  “I was beginning to think that they were never going to get here either. I’m sorry that Sarah’s asleep,” I continue, nodding towards the other crib, “but how would you like to hold your grandson, Mom?”

“Of course I would,” Mom says with tears in her eyes.  

Carefully, I get up from the chair and let Mom sit down.  I hand her Matt, starting to direct her on how to hold him, before breaking off with a self-conscious grin as I realize what I’m doing. “I know that you’ve done this before,” I say sheepishly.

“Once or twice, even if it has been a long time,” she jokes.  She looks down at the baby in her arms, sighing.  “He looks so much like you did when you were a baby.”

“That’s what Gram said,” I tell her, brushing a finger against Matt’s cheek as he sucks contentedly on the bottle Mom is holding for him.  “But God help us all if he ends up with my personality.”

“Oh, you weren’t that bad,” Mom protests with a smile.  We all know better than that, but I simply nod. 

Out of the corner of my eye, I notice movement in the other crib as Sarah stretches her arms, her eyes fluttering open.  Carefully, I lift her out of the crib, holding her against my chest.  “Dad, would you like to hold your granddaughter?” I ask.

“Of course,” he replies.  “Unlike your mother, I haven’t really been around babies much, so you can direct me all you want.”  Laughing, I instruct him how to hold his arms so that he’s supporting her entire body, especially her head.  I nod towards the nurse and she leaves to prepare another bottle.  “She’s got your eyes, too.”

“Yeah,” I reply.  “I was kind of hoping, once I saw that she matches her mother’s skin tone, that she’d have her eyes as well.”

“It’s an interesting combination,” Mom says, leaning over to take a closer look.  “I bet she’s going to attract her share of the guys when she gets older.  She is going to be gorgeous with that dark skin and those light eyes.”

“Oh, no, no, no,” I protest, shaking my head.  “She’s twenty hours and something minutes old.  I don’t want to think about boys in her life until she’s at least forty.”

Mom laughs.  “Welcome to parenthood, Harm.  Now you know how I felt when you started showing an interest in the opposite sex,” she says.  “You were still my little boy.”

“Mom, I was fifteen,” I remind her, remembering, as I’m sure that she is, when I got caught making out with Sally Webber, who lived down the street from us.  It had been one of the most mortifying experiences of my life.

“Harm, you’re going to find that there are two rules now that you’re a parent,” she says.

“And those would be?” I ask in a serious tone.

“First, they will *always* be your babies,” she says.  As I open my mouth to protest, she adds, “Yes, no matter how old they get, even when they’re thirty-seven and have children of their own.  You’ll always remember how tiny they were, how you held them in your arms like this.  Harm, you will always be my little boy, no matter what.”

“Sure, Mom,” I say, humoring her.  “And the other?”

As Matt finishes his bottle, she sets it aside and holds her hand out to me.  “You’ll never cease to be amazed at what you’re willing to do to protect your children,” she says, squeezing my hand.

10 MAY 2009
MCLEAN, VIRGINIA

“Happy Mother’s Day, Mommy,” the kids shout as we enter the bedroom.  I’m carrying the breakfast tray, Matt carries the wrapped collage that we put together, while Sarah and Elizabeth both carry smaller gifts from each of the kids and from me.

Matt sets his package on the bed and then clambers up, giving his mother an enthusiastic hug.  Sarah follows him up, nearly pushing her twin out of the way so that she can greet her mother as well.  Shooting the twins a warning glance, as Matt looks on the verge of pushing back, I set the tray down in front of my wife before lifting Elizabeth up onto the bed to join the others.

The kitchen managed to escape without too much damage.  Matt dropped an egg on the floor when getting them out of the fridge, while Sarah spilled flour on the counter while helping make the batter for the pancakes.  Elizabeth was the only one who didn’t participate in making a mess, but only because she’s too small to reach anything that she might have made a mess with.

“This looks wonderful,” Sarah says, acting surprised, just as I knew she would.  She smiles in delight at each of the kids in turn.  “Did all of you help make this?”

All three kids nod.  “Matt helped make the omelet,” I explain, “while Sarah helped with the pancakes.”

“Daddy showed me how to make the pancakes into dinosaur shapes like he always does,” she pipes in.  “We knew you’d like that.”

“Of course I do,” Sarah replies, kissing our older daughter’s cheek.  “And the omelet looks very good, too, Matt.”  She kisses him as well.  He mutters a little, but doesn’t pull away.

“I make toast,” Elizabeth interjects.

Sarah takes her into her arms, squeezing her tight.  “I’m sure I’ll love the toast, too,” she says.  “It’s a good thing that there’s so much food here, because I’m very hungry.”  She looks over the kids’ heads to wink at me.  The hunger isn’t a surprise under normal circumstances, as she still has a very healthy appetite, but she has even more of a reason to be so now, as she informed me last night when we started picking up where we’d left off in the dining room earlier.

“So what about you guys?” she asks, cutting off a piece of pancake with her fork and swirling it around in syrup.  “Aren’t you going to eat?”

“We ate before we fixed your breakfast,” Matt explains.  “Daddy said it would be hard for all of us to eat breakfast on the bed.”

“I guess that’s true,” she replies with a smile.

We sit in companionable silence as Sarah finishes her breakfast.  She seems to really enjoy what we made for her.  Unlike that long ago morning when Dad and I surprised Mom with breakfast in bed, we didn’t have the blind leading the blind in the kitchen.  I’ve started teaching the twins how to cook, so they managed to do a decent job with my supervision.

After she’s finished, I set the tray on the dresser, and then sit back down on the edge of the bed.  “Time for presents,” the twins squeal, to laughter from their mother and me.

“So which one should I open first?” Sarah asks, smiling at their enthusiasm.  It’s wonderful to see the kids taking as much pleasure in giving their mother presents as they usually do in receiving gifts.

“Daddy?” Matt asks, glancing at me.  Earlier, after a relatively mild debate about whose present would be opened first, I’d declared that I would make the decision on order.

“How about the big one first?” I suggest, handing her the collage.  As she rips off the paper, I explain, “This is from all three of the kids.”

“It’s wonderful,” Sarah exclaims as she tears the last of the paper away, her eyes darting from picture to picture.  “These are some of my favorite pictures.”

“We all painted our names on the mat,” our older daughter explains.  She shoots a glance at Matt as she continues, “Daddy helped Elizabeth, and he helped us decide which pictures to include.”

“I think that I want to hang this in the foyer,” Sarah says, setting the collage aside and wrapping her arms around the twins.  Elizabeth climbs into her lap, draping her arms around her mother’s neck.  “That way everyone can see it when they come into the house.  Now, what’s next?”

I hand her a large envelope.  “This one is from Elizabeth,” I say.

She pulls out a single sheet of paper, smiling.  Elizabeth and I had borrowed her sister’s crayons and I’d helped her draw a picture, a rough drawing of a dinosaur colored in blue.  “Daddy called it stega….”  She looks up at me for assistance.

“A stegosaurus,” I supply. 

“I love it,” Sarah insists, “and blue is one of my favorite colors.  Thank you, Elizabeth.”  She kisses our daughter’s forehead.

“Matt, why don’t you give Mommy your present?” I suggest. 

“I love this,” she says after she tears the paper off a coffee table book about dinosaur tracks.  “It goes nicely with your sister’s present.”  She takes Elizabeth’s present and sticks it inside the front cover of the book to protect it.

“Thank you, Mommy,” Matt says, clearly pleased.   Sarah has passed on her love of dinosaurs to our kids, and when Matt had seen the book in Barnes and Noble, he’d first wanted the book for himself.  When we’d been trying to think of individual presents from each of the kids for Mother’s Day, he changed his mind on his own and asked me to help him buy it for his mother.

“It’s time for my present now,” Sarah says, handing her mother a square box.  My wife opens the lid and pulls out a coffee mug, with ‘World’s Best Mommy’ painted on the side.  “I made it in Brownies.”

“I need a new coffee mug at work.  Did Daddy tell you how mine met with an unfortunate accident?”

Sarah nods, giggling.  “He said the handle broke off,” she says, “but I’d already made the mug the week before.”

“Then I’d say your timing was perfect.  I love it.”

“There’s one more present for you,” I say.  “Elizabeth, give Mommy the other box.”

“Here, Mommy,” Elizabeth says, handing over the smallest of the presents, a small, black jewelry box with a red ribbon tied around it.  This is my present to her, although I’d shown it to the twins a few days ago, explained the meaning behind it and got their enthusiastic approval.

Sarah pulls off the ribbon and snaps open the box, fingering the necklace inside, a white gold heart hanging from a chair, birthstones for all five of us forming the bottom of the heart.  Elizabeth’s birthstone forms the point, the twins’ are above that on either side, and then mine and Sarah’s above that, Sarah’s on the left and mine on the right.  Of course, I hadn’t realized when I’d ordered it that it will be out of date by the end of the year.

“Pretty,” Elizabeth says.

“Very,” Sarah says, taking the necklace out of the box and holding it out to me.  “Harm, will you help me put it on?”

I move over to sit on the edge of the bed next to her.  Sarah turns slightly away from me, holding her long hair up with her hands.  I fasten the necklace, and then drop a kiss onto the back of her neck.  “I’ll have to talk to the jeweler and find out how hard it will be to add another stone,” I whisper.

“Do you want to do the honors?” she whispers back, inclining her head towards the kids.

I nod, resting my hands on her shoulders.  “Kids, last night, Mommy told me something that we need to tell you,” I begin.  Sarah crosses one arm over her chest to cover one of my hands with hers, wrapping her fingers around mine.  “Around Christmas, Mommy’s going to have a baby.”

“Baby?” Elizabeth asks, uncertain.

“You’re going to have a younger brother or sister,” I explain to her.  She looks up at me, confused.  Okay, explaining this to her is going to take some more thought.  Sarah and I will have to think about that one.  The twins kind of understood when we told them about Elizabeth, although they had been expecting a sibling they could play with right then.

The twins understand now without explanations.  They remember when their mother was pregnant with Elizabeth, when Bud and Harriet had their last three, including their own set of twins, and when Carolyn gave birth to her and Jack’s second daughter four months after Elizabeth was born.  “I want a brother this time,” Matt says emphatically.

“Sorry, but Daddy and I have no control over that,” Sarah says, laughing.  We had this argument with him the last time as well.  “We will be happy with whatever God gives us.  Hopefully, he’ll send us a healthy, happy baby.”  Her fingers tighten around mine.  Her pregnancies have always been problem free, but she will be forty-two in two months.  Of course, she was just a few weeks short of her thirty-ninth birthday when Elizabeth was born.  Just like before, I’m sure that everything will be fine.

MAY 2007
KINKEAD’S
WASHINGTON DC

“The food here is wonderful,” Mom says, finishing off the last of her apple tart tatin with a satisfied sigh.  “Frank and I have been exploring DC’s restaurants since we got here, but we hadn’t found this one yet.”

“We don’t come here often,” I say, “but it is Bobbi’s favorite restaurant, and she likes to hold the occasional dinner meeting here.”

It’s a bit on the pricey side for Sarah and me, so outside of dinner meetings with Bobbi, this is definitely a special occasion only restaurant for us.  Sarah treated me for my fortieth birthday a few years ago, and we came here for our last anniversary, albeit two weeks late due to my being stuck in Iraq on the actual date.  Today definitely qualifies as a special occasion.  When they’d gotten married, I’d been hoping that Mom and Dad wouldn’t last thirty days.  Today, it’s been thirty years since that simple ceremony on a warm spring day.

“This is definitely one to visit again,” Dad says.  “This has been the best seafood meal I’ve had since that last meal at George’s Ocean Terrace just before we left California.  Harm, Mac, thank you for bringing us.”

“We were happy to do it,” Sarah assures him.  “After all, it isn’t every day that you celebrate a milestone like this.”

“Thirty years,” Mom sighs.  “Seems like it was yesterday, doesn’t it?  But at the same time, it seems like we’ve been together forever.”

Once, that statement might have bothered me, but not for years.  Almost half of Mom’s life has been spent with him.  He’s been her husband for nearly three quarters of my life.

I watch indulgently as Dad takes Mom’s hand in his and raises it to his lips.  Such a simple gesture, but it says so much.  It seems like they’re more in love today than they were on the day they said ‘I do’.  Or is it just that I chose not to notice back then?

I’d almost think my wife is a mind reader, or maybe it’s just that she knows me so well after over a decade, because she reaches over and takes hold of my hand, squeezing it gently.  I turn and smile at her.  I can concur with Mom’s last sentiment with regards to my own life and marriage.  I almost can’t remember anymore what my life was like before that September day in 1996 when Sarah walked into my life, but I think that I’ll always remember with perfect clarity every moment I’ve spent with her since then.  My life may as well have started in the Rose Garden.

“I think my life started the day you walked into my life,” Dad says, unconsciously echoing my own thoughts.  Will Sarah and I still be like that in twenty-three years?  I hope so with everything that is in me.

“Actually,” Mom says in a teasing tone, “as I recall it, you walked into mine.  Remember?”

“You know, I don’t think that I’ve ever heard this story before,” Sarah says.  “Harm has told me about the first day he met Dad….”

“Don’t remind me,” I mutter.  Everyone laughs a little at that.

“I had just moved to California from Michigan,” Dad begins, his eyes fixed on Mom.  “My mother was still alive back then, and her birthday was coming up.  She’s always been an art lover, so I thought that I could find her something in that vein.  Since I was new to the area, I’d asked one of the other executives I worked with if he knew of any galleries in the area.”

“I’d just started the gallery a few months earlier,” Mom continues.  “My grandfather had died the previous year and my brother and I had inherited a bunch of stock that he’d owned forever.  After all those years, I received a very tidy little sum when I sold it.  Of course, I was a bit naïve about the whole thing.  I may have had a good eye for art, but I really had no idea what went into running a business, so I was still struggling to get off the ground, trying to attract artists for exhibition and customers to buy their work.  So Frank had asked his coworker of his for recommendations….”

“You knew his wife from somewhere,” Dad picks up the story again, “from church, if I recall correctly.  So somewhere along the way, she knew you had started a gallery and had mentioned it to her husband.  So I ended up at Trish’s gallery, and I had no clue what I was really looking for.  I guess I looked obviously lost, so she walked up to me and asks if she could help.  She got me talking about my mother, her likes and dislikes, and she recommended a few pieces for me to choose from.”

“I wasn’t really thinking about a relationship at the time,” Mom says.  “I’d gone out a few times within the past couple of years before that, but the last guy I’d dated had issues with my home life.”

If I’m remembering the timeline correctly, that would have been the ass who had been stupid enough to tell Mom that I wasn’t anything like she’d described.

“There was no ‘meet cute’ or feeling of lightning striking or anything like that,” Mom adds, glancing in our direction with a smile.  I guess a romantic would describe my first meeting with Sarah as ‘meet cute’ and I definitely felt like I’d been struck by lightning, but not in the way spoken of in any love song.  “But I found that Frank was very easy to talk to, and he started coming into the gallery regularly.  I think the next excuse was that you’d just bought a house and were looking to dress it up with a few pieces.”

“See, I was attracted to Trish from the beginning,” Dad explains.  “Of course, I didn’t know that Trish was cautious about that kind of thing, or why she had reason to be.  I think it was more than a month before she told me that she had a son and what had happened to her husband.  It was another two before she took me home to meet Harm.”

“Which was a very important test,” I joke, “that he passed with flying colors.  He didn’t run screaming in the other direction when he met me.”

As everyone laughs, Sarah looks at me.  Someone else might have assured me that I surely couldn’t have been that bad, but she knows me better than that.

“We took things very slow,” Mom says as the laughter dies down.  “I had hoped that if I tried not to push Frank on Harm, Harm would get used to the idea of having him around and it would be easier on him.”

“And we all know how well that turned out,” I point out. 

“They were some bumps on the road,” Mom admits, putting it more politely than I might have, “but look at where we all are now.”

“Yeah,” I argue, “if you’d asked anyone thirty years ago if I’d be sitting here toasting to Mom and Dad’s thirty years of marriage, they would definitely have said ‘hell, no’.”

“But we’re all here now,” Mom says, reaching out and taking my hand.  “In the end, that’s all that matters.”

10 MAY 2009
ROSSLYN, VIRGINIA

“Harm, lunch was wonderful,” Mom says as we sit at the patio table, sipping coffee.  The kids are playing under the watchful eyes of Sarah and Dad on the elaborate swing set Mom and Dad had built in their back yard.  Elizabeth is going down the slide into her grandfather’s waiting arms while Matt and Sarah try to outdo each other on the swings by seeing who can go the highest.

“Actually, you can thank Sarah,” I say.  “She’s the one who suggested that we come over here and make something for you.  I was having a hard time figuring out what to do for you.”

“Harm, you’re my son,” she insists.  “Anything you do for me is special.”

“So Sarah kept trying to tell me,” I say.  I fall silent, my gaze falling on my playing children, marveling once again how complete my life seems.

“So are you ready for another one?” Mom asks.   We broke the news to them about the new baby over lunch, much to their delight. 

“I’ve always had it in the back of my mind that I’d like to have one more,” I reply. 

“Another son?” Mom asks with a grin.  Matt had informed his grandparents after the announcement that he wanted a brother.  I wonder if he was hoping that Grandma and Grandpa would give him a different response than the one he’d already gotten, that he just has to accept what we end up with.

“Two boys and two girls would be nice and even,” I say, “but I’m going to be happy no matter what.  It is a bit of a surprise, though.  We hadn’t talked about having another baby, especially with Sarah’s age.”

“You know,” Mom assures me, “you hear all the time about woman having babies at Mac’s age or even older.  It seems to be quite the fashion these days.  I’m sure everything is going to be fine, and even if something does happen, I’m sure you two will rise to the challenge.”

“It will be fine,” I insist.  “When she had Elizabeth, she was two weeks away from her thirty-ninth birthday.  That was a little less than three years ago.  I’m sure the doctor is going to want to do all the tests that were done last time, but I don’t want to stress about it.”

I feel Mom’s gaze on me and I turn to look at her.  “What are you thinking?” I ask.

“You seem so settled,” she says.  “You have a job you love, a wife and kids you adore.  In short, you have everything that I’ve ever wanted for you.  I’m very proud of you for all that you’ve accomplished.”

“Although I bet if someone had asked you ten years ago….” I begin.

“Nonsense,” she interjects.  “It just took you a little longer than most to find your way, but I’ve never doubted that you would.”

“Thanks, Mom,” I say.  We fall silent for a long moment, just sitting in companionable silence watching the kids.  After a few minutes, I feel her eyes on me again.

“Is there something on your mind?” she asks.

“I’ve just been thinking a lot the last few days,” I reply after spending a moment gathering my thoughts.  “One of the kids left out a photo album.  It was one of those ones that you and Dad gave me for my fortieth birthday.  So I started looking through it and it made me think about some things.”  I reach into one of the back pockets of my jeans and pull out a folded piece of paper, handing it to her.

She unfolds it, quickly reading the single sentence written on it, and then bursts out laughing.  “Yeah, it is funny, at least the way I ended up putting it on there,” I admit, “but something occurred to me yesterday.  I was trying to explain to Matt why he needed to be grounded.  I decided to use the example of my being grounded after Southeast Asia and how I eventually realized that you were right to ground me.  I realized something as I was telling him the story.  I’ve never told that I’m sorry, not only for that, but for everything that I put you through.”

“Harm, I know that you’re sorry,” she says, taking one of my hands in hers.  “I’ve known that for a long time.  I understood, better than you probably think that I did.  The irony was that you turned out to be right about your father.  Some people would say that you probably would have been justified in thinking ‘I told you so’.”

“Actually, I did,” I admit reluctantly.  “Sarah’s the only one I admitted that to, though, but by then, it didn’t matter who was right or wrong.  Dad was dead and had been for over sixteen years.  I really don’t know if it was then, or the second time that I went when I found out about Sergei, that I was finally able to reconcile myself to your need to move on.  I don’t really know if he was truly happy, but he did find some kind of peace, at the end at least.  He did die a free man.  I found that I was no longer able to begrudge you the happiness that you found with Frank.”

“It was not long after that second trip that you started calling Frank ‘Dad’,” she remembers.  “I knew then, you see.  When he told me about it that night, you should have seen the smile on his face.  He said that was probably the best gift that you’ve ever given him, but it was also the best gift you could have given me.  That’s how I knew that you were sorry.”

“I guess,” I say, “but I’ve never said the words.  I think that I do need to say them, for myself as much as for you.  You know, I have said sorry to Dad, at least twice that I can remember, but I’ve never said the words to you.  So, I’m sorry, Mom, for everything that I put you through.”

She smiles at me, a warm, loving smile that lights up her entire face.  “Apology accepted,” she says.  She shakes her head.  “Maybe I said that I didn’t need to hear them to know how you feel, but it is nice to hear you finally say them.   It means a lot to me.”

“I’m glad,” I say.  “Happy Mother’s Day, Mom.”