You came into this world ready to fight. After all, you’re number two and what is second place if not for the first loser?
But it was more than that. Where your older brother had to transition away from being the sole proprietor of mom and dad’s attention, you had to demand your piece of the pie. You came to hand-me-down clothes and hand-me-down toys, blankets that were still good but had lost that soft, fuzzy sheen of newness.
You would not have a hand-me-down personality.
From an early age, we learned that there is no stubborn quite like second child stubborn. I remember so many days with your hands on your hips, crying at the top of the stairs because I wouldn’t carry you down, even though you were more than capable of safely descending by yourself. And that’s just one example.
Where your brother was sunshine and rainbows with an occasional light shower, your personality is the brightest heat of a hot desert day along with the blinding chill of a winter blizzard. You feel everything – all the good and the bad. And you make us feel it too.
You are my natural button-pusher, my poke-the-bear kind of boy. Because wouldn’t it be cool to see if it actually bites? You are the child who, when told not to step on the newly finished quilt top, walked around the outside, stepping as near as you could without actually touching the fabric.
Honestly, you kind of broke me.
You are the reason I horrified church ladies as they frantically pointed to the Cheerios that you were eating off the gym floor. Is he eating those? Yes, but at least it’s food and I know where it came from. A few gym floor germs can’t be worse than the car he licked the other day, or the air soft pellet he swallowed, or the tin foil he tried to eat the moment I turned my back to finish cooking dinner.
To my child that’s everything hard and everything good bundled into one bright package, I pray that you understand that to a mother’s heart, there is no second place. You were never our plan B or fail-safe. As differently as you may see the world, I am excited to see and experience it from your own, very unique perspective, with all of its highest highs and the lowest lows.
