MacGuyver is still out of town...comes home in two more days. My mother was here for two weeks to take care of Frog, and it was wonderful, with the exception perhaps that my kid now talks non-stop. My mom was an early childhood teacher and she seems to have this effect on children; she spends even a little bit of time with a kid and the kid evolves. Yaya is the grandmother version of the obelisk from 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Anyway, she's gone now and it's just me and the little man.
You forget, when there are other people around all the time, what an amazing human being your child is. I mean you don;t forget, it just slips to the back of your mind, in a way. you have to get dinner on the table, maybe, or finish up a work project. I feel like I'm always multitasking. But today I picked him up from summer camp and we went home and just played. I did exactly as I was told. I didn't try to control or suggest.
Put these Legos in the back of that traincar because they are pieces of coal? Got it.
Put one hand behind my back and have a swordfight with you using a pencil and a piece of wooden train track, even though I know my knuckles are gonna get cracked hard? You betcha.
Let you hug me twenty times, each time knocking me over so that we roll, together, onto my back, and then I bench press you up into the sky with your arms out like wings and hold you there while you say you're swooping around clouds, and watch the joy on your face as you hover there, weightless, and be glad that I've been doing weights at the gym so that I can hold you there as long as you like, and get choked up because I used to do this exact. same. thing. when you were 3 months old? Yes please.
I made his favorite drink: an orange-juice-and-frozen-mango-chunks blender smoothie (warning him, as stipulated, before hitting the button to blend so that he could run into his room with his hands over his ears). Then i made his favorite dinner on request as well: fish sticks and mac and cheese with LOTS of ketchup. I put the ketchup in one of these, to make him giggle. He giggled. Satisfaction.
After dinner he pulled both stuffed chairs' ottomans over to the window and put them side by side, then laid on his belly and looked out at cars for the longest time. I'm amazed at his attention span. I was cleaning up dishes and he said, "Mommy, would you like to come sit with me and watch cars please?" Just like that, those exact words. I'm so proud to be his mother. I stopped what I was doing and sat down with him, pulled him into my lap and he leaned into me, holding his blanket. he rubbed the blanket on his stubbed toe from this morning: like mothers' kisses, blankets have magical healing properties. We read Curious George & The Chocolate Factory(sort of a cross between Willy Wonka and that episode of I Love Lucy with the candy...) and Where the Wild Things Are. He said the monsters in Sendak's book were mean sometimes, just like the kids at school are mean to him sometimes. I try not to worry about these things, and just tell him that in every group of people, somebody's going to be grumpy on any given day, and to not let those things bother you. If he mentions it more I'll investigate, but he tells me I'm mean when all I do is ask him to go brush his teeth. Probably nothing, but my heart aches just a little to think of him feeling sad or alone. I want to protect him, to investigate, but one tentatively probing question sends the anecdote scurrying off into the shadows.
I sing him to sleep. It's not unusual for me to sing to him at bedtime...I have quite an eclectic menu of songs he can choose from actually, from Patsy Cline to Johnny Cash to Raindrops on Roses and songs from Into The Woods. Songs from Porgy & Bess. "Swing Low Sweet Chariot." "Stay Awake" from Mary Poppins.
What is unusual, tonight, is that I sing him, actually, to sleep. I rubbed his back as I sang, something he doesn't usually let me do, saying he's "not a baby." (A few days ago a man at a store said to him, "Excuse me young man," and Frog complained to me for ten minutes that he is "NOT YOUNG."). Usually he is awake when I leave the room. Tonight, I sang Summertime, over and over, verse after verse, in an endless loop, and watched as his eyes, trained on me in the half-darkness, illuminated only by the glow of the fish tank, started to droop, then close momentarily, then stay closed, the same sleepy pattern of resistance and defeat that he used to follow when I nursed him as an infant, rocking him during a 3am feeding and singing a lullaby as his intense little eyes found mine in the darkness as his mouth worked at my breast.
Tonight I rubbed his back (covered in pajamas patterned in traffic and squiggly roads). I dug a nest out for him from among over a dozen stuffed animals. He climbed up into his loft bed on his own, one handed. He's a big boy. But still, he let me rub his back and sing to him; he searched out my eyes in the darkness again, and we connected. The unrelenting beauty of watching your child fall asleep, relaxed, from something you have done--a soothing "comfort food" meal, a song, a warm bath, a back rub--is almost too much to bear, if you're present with it, if you're paying attention. Too often I am not. Too often I am thinking of the dishes I have to wash, the conference call I have to be one in fifteen minutes, the TV show I want to watch once he's asleep so my brain can shut off and quit generating to-do lists in my head. If i can shut all that out and really be with my child, completely, for thirty minutes at bedtime, it builds us both back up from whatever has broken us down.
We understand each other.
He is almost no longer young.
I am almost no longer old.
We are not so different. Four and thirty-six are not so different.
We are both growing, each in our own way. Today he showed me his elbow "muscle" as proof of strength.
Yes, very hard, rock solid muscle, that elbow, I said.
We are not so different:
I can't always correctly identify my own strengths either.
We'll navigate that together, I think.
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