Happy Birthday, Itty-Bit. My daughter, my snuggle-bunny when she was so tiny you could barely see her, Michelle, is 21 years old today. I have no idea how she and her brother Patrick can be their ages when my wife and I, their parents, just aren't old enough. Another unexplained mystery I guess. Michelle was in a hurry to get here, arriving with a rush and very little labor on 2 May 1987 in Kettler Krankenhaus, around the corner from where we lived in Offenbach am Main. I had taken Patrick the afternoon before to his grandparents' since Sigrid felt very sure 'the baby' was coming soon.
Patrick, since he came home from the first day of kindergarten to tell us he was 'das einzige ohne' (the only child without) a brother or a sister, had been lobbying for a baby sister. I have no reason to believe he understood the biology or the mechanics involved at his age (I was a little fuzzy at my age, come to think of it), but he seemed to devote a LOT more attention to me in his exhortations than to Sigrid. As I loaded him, his overnight bag and a couple of toys into the car's backseat to drive him crosstown for the sleepover at Oma and Opa, he told me he had changed his mind and wanted a little brother….Considering we had video sonograms of his sister, I had to tell him he was a little late with this request. That's okay, he told me, there's always next time. I found that reassuring though I couldn't tell you why.
The next morning, suitcase packed, husband by the hand, Sigrid walked through the park to the hospital. Within hours, Michelle Alison Kenny was born. I discovered by the time we brought her home four days later almost nothing I had learned about babies with Patrick was of any value this time. Michelle spent hours quietly sizing up the world from her kinderbett, sometimes surprising us as we had thought she was asleep only to discover she was wordlessly watching us, her parents (and probably trying to sort out the father character). She and I had a routine after her evening meal as Sigrid would prepare her for bed. I would carry her into the bathroom and with her on my arm together with her brother (and all the English we thought he knew at that time) would sing loudly and off-key 'How Much is that Baby in the Mirror?' (to the tune of How Much is that Doggie in the Window).
When she was still an infant I would sit with her on the couch in our living room and talk about anything in the world and she would nestle into the crook of my arm and watch me with her eyes as if I might actually do something clever or earth-shatteringly important. I remember her as small and quiet, especially when my mother came from New Jersey to see grand children her husband never saw in this life and Michelle, barely three, would cling to Sigrid and whisper in her ear while warily staring at my mother when she arrived at the Frankfurt Flughafen. Michelle didn't grasp the idea of an airport and assumed 'die frau' (the woman and what she called my mother) lived in the Flughafen. I didn't realize this until long after mom had flown home, and Michelle asked if we could stop at the airport and visit 'Oma America'.
There was a time when I could read her a story while she sat on my lap and she'd point at each word with her right index finger. She had to have noticed my German was horribly different from her mom's, and from any other person in her world, but she cut me a break about it. There was a point in her life when she would come to me to ask Life's Big Questions and wait patiently while I shadow-boxed and failed (miserably) to find the right words or give the right advice. Those years are long ago and far away now. She has her own answers and hopes the questions don't upset me too much, even though they often do. There was her first violin and her first razor scooter, her becoming a young teen in middle school who lived for Nick Carter (who ever that was) and tolerated her grey-haired father despite his being a bozo, through Norwich Free Academy where she discovered there wasn't a musical instrument she couldn't pick up and master.
I can now see, clear as day, the influence of all that "How Much is that Baby in the Window?" but cannot see what has become of the little girl who was always in a hurry. She was, and is, fiercely independent, sometimes almost perversely so to the point of lunatic obstinacy. I cannot imagine where she gets this from. ;-) She has her mother's smile, the one that lights up the room and a way of cocking her head, moving it from side to side, that makes me think of Leonard Cohen.
All those hours online gave me insight, but no warning, as to what today would be about and how surprisingly painful it would feel, despite knowing in advance it was coming and that it had to come. She'll be home this weekend from college and I can close my eyes and see the world as it was once was, in my imagination. And while our musics differ, I think she can understand her old man would be tempted by Paul Simon, but chooses Warren Zevon. Happy Birthday, kiddo. Love, Dad.
-bill kenny
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