FirstBorn is, as you may have guessed, my first child.  I knew he would be a boy.  In fact, had the midwife told me I had had a girl, I would have checked for balls anyway…no wait, that’s my mother…

Anyway, they placed him in my arms, we looked at each other and it was one of those magical moments when I could almost read his mind:  “What the heck am I doing with you?” (biological factoid:  babies don’t have their swear gene switched on at birth)

But I digress.  I couldn’t wait until he started talking – then I truly understood the phrase “be careful what you wish for” because it was 24/7:  what he did in preschool, what commercials he saw on tv, what was going on outside.  The original Gladys Kravitz.  I grew more and more frantic as I realized chatty baby did not come with an off switch.  About age 18 he turned into the Original Clam Boy.  I swear, one teensy weensy little comment about getting cancer and burning in hell and they hold it against you forever!  I tried reasoning with him:  You have no life insurance because you don’t insure liabilities (duh!), but that worked as well as 47% of the nation.  In other words, it didn’t.

But FirstBorn is brilliant.  He’s going for a double major in Organic Chemistry and Math and gets great grades with good earning potential (that way he’ll be able to afford a nice nursing home for his mother, not the one where you can smell pee from the parking lot).  He also volunteers as a tutor for underprivileged kids in the hood.  well, that last sentence was slightly embellished.  He tutors underperforming kids in Naperville and they pay him.  What, you thought he was Father Theresa?

For years I figured he was a changeling or maybe adopted and that his real parents would appear one day to claim him, but those dreams have since died.  and yet he lives…