One of my favorite moments this Christmas was watching old Christmas videos with the kids. We always videotape Christmas mornings, but we haven’t watched them for ages—some, we haven’t ever watched. We picked them at random, one when Kaleb was a baby, the year we gave the Bigs DSs. I told Kendell he should find a really old one, so he put in the tape from Christmas 2001. This was a hard Christmas for us. Kendell had been unemployed for a year, and that month he had spent two weeks working in New York on computers damaged in the 9-11 attacks. Our Christmas was entirely provided by a secret Santa (who was my sister-in-law, I’m 99% certain), and while that act brought me much peace (not for the gifts themselves, but for the fact that it made me feel seen, even though the seeing itself couldn’t save us), it didn’t erase the deep fear that always ran through me. What would happen to us?

But as I watched that video, I didn’t remember my sadness and fear. What I remembered was how that felt, loving those three sweet little ones. Haley, at six, was a miniature version of who she is now, loving her brothers but also slightly bossy. Every single gift of Nathan’s (who was barely two) was opened by Haley, part way, and then he cheerfully took it from her and finished. Nathan, too, seemed like a tinier copy of himself, cheerful and bubbly.

But Jake.

Oh my little Jakey. I had forgotten how…Jake he was. At very nearly four years old. I don’t have a word for it—I’ve never had a word for it. For his essential Jacob self, which was kind and helpful and sweet and good.

At the start of the video, the kids are standing at the end of the hall, lined up like turtles, waiting to go into the front room to see if Santa came. Jake is whispering let us see, let us see, and the excitement emanating from him is almost palapable.

He was so happy. So happy.

It wasn’t just Christmas-day happiness. I looked back at pictures today, on his 18^th birthday, and I remembered: part of his essential Jakey self was his happiness.

I saw it in that video. I see it in the photos. I have it in my memory.

But I don’t see it much in the Jake I know now
.

Unlike Haley and Nathan, he has changed—in his deepest, essential self. He has lost that happiness that used to surround him like a halo. I have worried and ached and despaired and prayed—over my sweet Jake. Seeing that video, I could finally see it clearly. Why I am in the same room with him but miss him: his happiness, the unique, undefinable quality that defined him, is missing.

Today he turns 18. Life is waiting for him. He has a scholar­ship and another scholarship. He can be anything he want. I’m excited to see what he does with his potential. Who he becomes.

But more than anything, I want to help him find his happiness again. I want him to have the grown-up version of that joy he used to carry. I always worried the world would strip it from him (it is one of the abiding themes of all my journal entries about him), that I wouldn’t be mother enough to save it. Who has happiness in this world? Jake did, though. I don’t know—is it just adolescence? Or is it more?

In the video from 14 years ago, Jake hugs me after he opens a gift. It was a Rescue Hero (remember those?) but it doesn’t matter what it was. What matters, now, was him hugging me. Was being reminded of who he was and what he lost and how he’s changed. I want him to find it again, that happiness. I want him to be who he is.

I don’t quite know how to help him yet. But at least now I can see we need to start.