Angela Kelsey

Happy Birthday, April

You may know April as the mother of Hunter and Colton, Mr. Z’s grandsons.

Today is her twenty-seventh birthday.

She is generous, wise, funny, loving, comfortable in her own skin.

Yesterday she said, taking Colton from me, watching him fall instantly to sleep on her shoulder, “He just needed to smell me so that he could go to sleep.”

I didn’t know that babies connected with their mothers through smell. But she was telling me something more, something deeper that I can’t quite understand and can’t stop thinking about.

She teaches me every time I am with her, and I’m never sure whether she knows it or not.

She doesn’t seem to worry. She is.

I wish for her not to change.

And while I’m wishing, I wish for Hunter and Colton what Adrienne Rich wished for her sons:

“If I could have one wish for my own sons, it is that they should have the courage of women. I mean by this something very concrete and precise: the courage I have seen in women who, in their private and public lives, both in the interior world of their dreaming, thinking, and creating, and the outer world of patriarchy, are taking greater and greater risks, both psychic and physical, in the evolution of a new vision.”
— Of Woman Born

Happy birthday, courageous April.