Happy Birthday to my beautiful son, Capa, my constant reminder of how everything we experience in this life is relative. My previous 32 revolutions around the sun should’ve made the 33rd just another spin around the old block—but you have made every turn around the corner feel anew. Every week and every month you blew past a milestone like a road marker on a never ending highway. I’ll always remember the first time you opened your eyes in the bright winter light shining through the window, your eyelids creaking open like a pair of attic doors. How your smile has changed from a gummy smirk to your best impression of Michael Jordan with your tongue out, to a brief hillbilly phase, and now a hungry shark. The cliches and adages come true one at a time and the best I can do is watch in awe.

I can’t help but think of the way I am going to screw you up in one way or another, knowing full well that it is an inevitability. Every time I hold your hands to help you walk I flip through a rolodex of life advice in my head, finding fault in almost every single kernel. I can already see us playing catch in the backyard as I start in on a forced aphorism: “Well son, life is about balance–but not too much–because the real fun is on the extremes–but make sure you always come back to center–or at least try to, because nobody likes a square.” Then as we continue to chase mom around the house you let out a squeal–a release of an overabundance of joy and excitement that you simply can’t contain any longer– and I realize that parents are just people doing the best that they can do.

My childhood as one of six children in a household with divorced parents resembled a chicken coop more than it did a home. We all wandered around aimlessly, trying to find a direction or something to eat–yet here we are–years later and we all survived and turned out to be self-sufficient, albeit very different adults. Not a single one of us got nabbed by life’s proverbial hawks. So it’s hard for me to say, given my sibling’s similar circumstances, the best way a person can be an effective parent. The free-range method has seemed to work out for the Huies.

I can safely say that I will have more of a presence in your life than a chicken handler, Capa, even if it is at whatever cost that I cannot predict. It is our responsibility as parents to raise our children in the positive ways that we weren’t as kids with the hope of “giving them a better life than we had.” This is not to disparage my roots, my parents, or my childhood, all of which I am grateful for, but rather to gain clarity on what effective parenting will look like for my relationship to you.

I hope that the amount you have grown in your first year creates a trend in your life, Capa. Not one borne out of mammalian physical necessity but one that reminds you when you’re my age that a plateau is your worst enemy. After the age of 30 people jokingly say that they stop counting. I admit that at times I have gotten lost in the years, but thanks to you, my beautiful little reminder, I’m going to start again with one.