I’m going to break my rule and write a post about my son. I shy from this, because I want to protect his privacy, and because I don’t want to endanger his safety in any way. Not that I have any reason to feel that any of us are endangered. We really live a quite mild life. But you never know what might happen. We’re a cautious kind of folk. It’s funny that I’m getting relatively confident about posting about my own life on this wild, reckless internet: but I still shy from posting about my family.
Which seems impossible, because I am not myself without my family.
Anyhow, my son, not to brag, (if bragging about a child annoys you, please feel free to stop reading right now) but if you are curious about a proud mother’s story—my son is really an amazing and special human being.
I would like to take credit for this, but I can’t, he just came out that way. Maybe I gave him some of his genes, yes, a part, but in him, it’s really just his strong, delightful spirit. Which I do think came from above.
He came out of my womb after many unsuccessful years of trying, and the doctor put him on my chest, and he looked up at me with the eyes of a wise old man. He didn’t cry. He didn’t smile. He just made the deepest eye contact that I had ever experienced (not counting concentration exercises in conservatory acting school. But that gaze was still deeper). It truly was life-altering moment, at which I dedicated myself to his care and expression. I suddenly knew why I had been born a woman: so that I could give birth to and raise to the best of my ability this exemplary specimen of human life.
He has continued to amaze us through his six years of life. He is polite, and curious, and joyful, and robust. He is smart and drinks in facts about nature and science and planets and mechanical operations. He remembers the technical names for things, and he puts processes together in his mind: he synthesizes knowledge. He asks questions we can’t possibly know the answer to. He corrects us when we’re wrong.
But he is also hugely emotional. He beats himself up when he makes a mistake, calling himself stupid, until it escalates so much that he proclaims he wants to die. For instance, we were at the Children’s Museum the other day, and he was in the workshop and decided to build a plane out of metal nuts and bolts and thick pieces of plastic with pre-cut holes in squares and rectangles. He just got a vision and focused down in an amazing way to try to get it completed. He sent me around the table for more parts, calling them out by name and number: two more bolts; three more nuts, a washer. He used three big furniture coasters for the wheels. But when it came to the propeller, the holes of the templates wouldn’t align with the L-brackets: and he was just done. It was junk, ruined, trash. I scolded the attendant for supplying L-brackets that didn’t align properly with the plastic plates, and we both tried to convince my son to be happy with how his project turned out. There was simply no consoling him.
He did let it go by the time we got to the gift shop, where we bought a little tin toy plane to go on his bicycle. But I wish that he had given himself the satisfaction of enjoying the thing he made.
He at one time accused my husband and I of lying about our love for him, and our love for each other. He is so convincing in his rhetoric, that I wonder if he knows something we don’t. Like he’s got a direct line to the truth.
But part of that, I know, is just a big imagination, processing the fears that we all have, about love and life and fear and death.
We are probably feeding him too much fiction, because we both like fiction: we are theatre and book people. But we try to make it good fiction. We might be feeding him too much religion, too. But as a person who was raised outside of religion, I feel like it is better for him to spend his childhood belonging, so that he can rebel properly when he’s a teen, than the sort of conflict I had always wanting to belong, but never being able to fully find a way in.
And it is comforting to say the bedtime prayer:
Now I lay me down to sleep
I pray the Lord my soul to keep
Two angels standing by my bed
One at my feet, one at my head
To guide me safely through the night
And wake me with the morning light.
Which is way more hopeful than I learned it second hand in a non-religious family growing up:
If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take.
So glad that part was redacted.
Because family and prayer should be about comfort, and trust, and warmth, and belonging.