A Child's Life Is a Page-Turner

The Boston Herald

You never think, when you are young and writing down words in a baby book, that someday these words will mean so much. That the height and weight of a baby at three and six and nine months will be numbers that matter. That all the "firsts" - “Sleeps through the night,” “Takes her first steps,” “Says his first words,” - will some day be both a surprise and a treasure, like a U.S. Savings Bond that you tucked away in a drawer and forgot you had.

A faded birth announcement. A lock of baby hair preserved in cellophane. A few simple reflections. You never imagine that one day these things will be priceless.

But it happens. Kids grow up and leave home and get married and baby books get stored away. And then the phone rings and it's the child whose history you've chronicled. Only she isn't a child anymore. She's a woman who is having a baby herself. And she says out of the blue, "Do you know where my baby book is? Can I look at it?" And all at once, something done on the run, full of half-finished thoughts and slightly out-of-focus pictures and old report cards and notes written on construction paper in crayon by a child just learning to print are like nuggets of coal pressed by weight and time into a handful of diamonds. 

I wish now that I had filled in all the spaces in my children's baby books. I wish that I had written about every Christmas and birthday and every friend and game. But I didn't because I thought I would remember all these things and that I had all the time in the world to someday write them down.

But "someday" is a David Copperfield word. It's the lion on the stage, which you know even the best magician can't make disappear. And then, presto, he does. Where does the lion go?

The same place where all our somedays go.

"Baby's Milestones - Birth to Seven Years." That's what's printed on the cover of my daughter's baby book. So many years, I thought. So many empty pages.

But the years fly by like a favorite vacation. You savor them. You take pictures and notes and laugh and look at the calendar and think  there are so many more days left. Then half the days are gone. Then most. And then the vacation is over, babyhood done and you tuck the baby book stuffed with mementos into a plastic space-saver. And though you're sad that this trip ends, you know it's not the real end because childhood is the next long trip and that's just begun.

My mother kept a baby book for me, which I found stored in the plastic space-saver next to my daughter's. Inside, in her neat print, in answer to the question "Baby resembles?" my mother wrote, "Mother and Father."

I laughed when I read this. I don't look like my father. I never did. I am the picture of my mother. But because she loved him, she wrote that I resembled him, too.

I like that she did this.

My mother did a better job filling in my baby book than I did filling in my daughter's. She dated every picture and wrote on every page. But mostly the book she kept for me and the books I've kept for my children are all the same, testaments of love full of "firsts" and growth charts and enthusiasm and pride. There's a lock of my hair saved in cellophane, too, and next to it my mother's words: "First hair cut - June, 1950. Age - Two and a half. Place - Jean's in Central Square.” 

And so the story goes on. My mother's to me, mine to my daughter and soon, with the grace of God, my daughter's to her child.

"I thought when I started this book it would take an awful long time to reach the last page, but it really goes by fast," my mother wrote at the end of my baby book.

Faster than we are able to believe. Faster than we can imagine.