Mason turned seventeen years old on Wednesday. To celebrate, several of our family members came over for pizza, lasagna, a piece of cookie cake, and some ice cream.

I didn’t sleep well the night before Mason’s party, and woke up Wednesday morning just before 5 a.m. I arrived at the office just before 6 a.m., worked hard on a project until 4:30, picked up the cookie for Mason’s party a little after five, and made it home roughly five minutes before our first guests arrived. It was a long day, and by the end of the evening I was wiped out.

It wasn’t until I was in bed and the lights were out that I began to process the day. Thinking about Mason’s seventeenth birthday had me reminiscing about his sixteenth birthday at EightyThree Arcade, and how excited Mason was to get his driver’s licence and first car. With my eyes closed, memories of each of his previous birthdays came flooding back. There was the party he had at Incredible Pizza when he turned ten (which he loved), and the one he had there when he turned fifteen (which he decided he was too old to be doing). There was the year we got floor seats to a Thunder game. There was the year we went to Jump Zone, and the year we rented the mini-golf place in Crossroads Mall just months before it closed for good. I thought about the Xbox cake I made one year (the one with black icing, that turned everybody’s poop black), and the year of the ridiculously butchered Rubik’s Cube cake. I thought about each of our (now three) houses Mason has celebrated a birthday in.

And then, lying still in the darkness, I came to the end of the memories. I reached December, 2000, the last Christmas we celebrated before Mason was born. It was a fine year; everybody came over and we had a family holiday gathering, but laying there in bed, thinking about that night, it all seemed hollow. How could we have known what we were missing, and how much our lives would change the following year? In the folder where I keep all my digital pictures, I have 13 photos from Christmas 2000. From the Christmas of 2001, two weeks after Mason was born, I have 207.

Still in bed, I tried to remember the Christmas of 1999, and couldn’t. Surely we did something? I tried and tried to remember what we did that year, but couldn’t come up with anything.

Happy Birthday, Mason. Mommy and I had a life before you were born, but it’s getting harder to remember it each year.