Thursday is the little angel's second birthday.  The past two years have changed me more than the thirty that came before them.

Today I thought for a few hours that the little angel had beaten up one of her Waddler B friends.  It was a case of mistaken identity.  When J's mother told me that she thought the little angel had been the one to attack him and scratch his face so much that it swelled, I almost threw up on my keyboard.  I found myself in tears in front of six co-workers over it.  I think I was in pain not because I thought she had struck out at another child - she's two, after all - but because I thought she had done it unprovoked.  I thought perhaps she was harboring some anxiety of which I was unaware.  I thought maybe it was connected to me going back to an office and giving up an hour and a half of the time we spent together each day, an act that was not entirely my choice.

At lunch my friend B. pointed out we were both born under the sign of Aquarius.  I pointed out that that made sense, not because I put any faith in horoscopes - I am the great-granddaughter of a Lutheran minister, after all - but because the water sign is traditionally thought to be torn between the yearning for creative expression and the practicality of needing to provide a good living, the awareness of the reality of it all.  B. is a talented artist.  I am a struggling writer.  But he has a wife who has had medical problems, to the extent that she had to rebuild her whole life and identity, and I have over-analyzed my role as provider and mother to the point where sometimes I can barely breathe under the responsibility of it all.

Tonight as I waited SIX MINUTES TILL NIGHT-NIGHT four times, I watched the little angel toss and turn in her little Carter's short set, thinking how incredibly insane it was that I had grown her in my innards for ten months and successfully pushed her out into the world, for better or for worse.  The world may be a terrible and beautiful place, a sublime place, in every sense of the world, but I think it is a better place because she is in it. 

She is a beautiful, loving person, already at two.  She is my finest work.

Happy birthday, little angel.