Essay #3: Contrast Essay

I am blessed with two beautiful boys, intensely rich with humor and vitality. You’d recognize each as being mine and, after seeing them together even for a split second, you’d know that they belonged to each other as well. That’s where the similarity ends. From the point of conception on, they have been completely different.

Aska didn’t move much in my belly. I used to get scared that something was wrong. He’d go for days hardly moving at all. When he did, it was big, stretching movements that rolled across my distended belly. Hagen didn’t stop moving. He found more nooks and crannies in me than I ever dreamed I had. Aska easily turned for his arrival into the world. Hagen refused. Nope, he was standing straight up, thank you very much and would come in his own time. Aska was a normal birth, 6 hours of one long contraction and there he was. Hagen had to be cut out. He was too busy practicing his dance moves to be bothered with the birth canal.

They learn differently as well. Aska came out of me asking for a book. Hagen thinks books are for stacking, little portable ladders that lead to what is “no”. Aska knew his ABC’s long before his 3^rd birthday. Hagen knows his way around a computer like nobody’s business but has no interest what so ever in the alphabet. Everything that I thought I knew about the “time-line” for babies was thrown overboard when Hagen came. They both know so much but about such different things.

The differences don’t end there. Emotionally, Aska is sensitive with a quiet subdued strength. He is easily affected but not so easily persuaded. He’s not afraid to cry or laugh or bend himself around the mood of a room. He will as quickly retreat into his own mood without asking that anyone join him. Hagen’s strength is different. He is boisterous and adamantly concerned with mood. He insists that there be no anger directed at him or at anyone that he loves. He can’t stand to cry but will always laugh along. He, too is affected by the mood of the room but insists that it pay heed if not attend to his mood first and foremost. I’d have neither be any other way.

I celebrate my boys’ differences; strengths and weaknesses equally embraced. They are both perfectly themselves, perfectly suited to their mother and perfectly different from one another.