LandfallVoyages

Already. A decade and a half it’s been since the universe and the gods that be saw fit to favor us with the most wonderful and capricious April Fool’s day gift ever.

People are always surprised we didn’t know ahead of time that Eli was going to have achondroplastic dwarfism. “Didn’t you have, like, prenatal care and ultrasounds and stuff?” they ask. And we did–it’s just that these kids are like womb ninjas. The telltale disproportion doesn’t show up until you get towards the end of your last trimester. Which we pretty much skipped. They wonder if we’ve got secret dwarven ancestors, if we did something to cause his dwarfism, or even if we adopted him. The simple answer is that we plain got lucky. Tibetan Buddhists believe that right before the moment of conception, when we’re all still swirling around in the aether, we get to choose our parents. I like to think that’s true.

At any rate, Eli came into this world most definitely in his own time (two months early, really?) and on his own terms. Achondroplasia is a point mutation, just two amino acids transposed along the great helix that holds the code for how our bodies are made.  We don’t carry the gene for dwarfism, but he does, so while we wouldn’t be likely to have another Achon kid we can always hold out for Achon grandbabies.

Every year when April swings around we’re always surprised it’s come round so quick and frankly, most of these years we’ve not had much in the way of breathing room. Never really got to just take a minute and step out of crisis mode. To, I don’t know…savor this moment, this milestone achieved, this kid we get to share a life with.

The last couple of years he’s been stable–no tricky medical complications leaving him camped out on Death’s Door, no “simple” orthopedic surgeries stygian labors that stretch out for half a year all so he can run and jump like a kid, no common colds landing him in the hospital for two weeks with pneumonia that just won’t quit until his lungs are nothing more than useless sacs of mostly fluid. Since the day he was born, it seems, we’ve been fighting like hell just to hang onto him.

And now…we have that moment. And it is magnificent.

He’s like an intricate puzzle box. Every move reveals something new and unexpected, leaves me wonderstruck. Don’t get me wrong, he’s still a bonafide teenager–struggling along through the labyrinth that is young adulthood, shoulder to shoulder with all the other teenagers out there. But every day, we get to see a little bit more of the man he will be and we’re so proud of him.

Of course, he would say it doesn’t take much to amaze us these days because we’re well into doddering decrepitude. I’m not gonna argue the point because I still need his eyes to decipher the annoyingly tiny fine print they’re slapping on everything these days.