My Very Favorite One

Jack’s voice is like music.  I have been thinking this for a while now, wanting to write it here.  It will deepen one day – I’ll never forget the day I called home and my 9-years-younger brother answered the phone with a man’s voice, a stranger’s voice.

Right now, at age five, Jack’s voice is particularly sweet and pure.  He speaks and I think “honey,” or “cathedral choir” – he speaks and I think “angel.”  His voice is celestial, melodic and lovely, his voice compels love.  Every day after school, he walks in from the garage and asks me in those high, sweet tones: “How did the baby do?  Did he have any poopies?  How many?”  And while I’m laughing at this question – why does he ask this question?  Who taught him to be concerned for the baby’s bowels? – I’m also thinking God, he is so sweet, my God.

He is my very favorite son.

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Liam was playing outside yesterday and I yelled “stay in the yard,” and he heard me and acknowledged me and headed straight for the garage, where he pulled out his Jake and the Neverland Pirates Big Wheel tricycle and rode it off down the street, manifestly no longer in the yard.  With some children this would be a purposeful challenge of my authority, boundary-testing to see how I’d react.  But with Liam, he was simply doing what he wanted to do at that moment.  If he’d wanted to stay in the yard, he’d have stayed in the yard, whether I told him to or not.  He wanted to ride down the hill in his Big Wheel, so he rode down the hill in his Big Wheel, whether I told him not to or not.  He takes my instruction under advisement and then does his thing.  This will actually be quite good for his mental health when he is thirty, but it poses a challenge to his bodily integrity and continued existence at the careless and largely uninformed age of three.

Back to the Big Wheel incident.  I called to him to return, and he continued down the road.  I told him not to go into the trees and brush in the un-cleared lot at the bottom of our court, as he pedaled steadfastly into those trees and brush (dead alligators have been seen there – there could be live ones, too!)  I followed him down, huffing and puffing, equal parts nervous for his safety and mad at his disobedience.  Just as I reached the treeline, he emerged, scratched up pretty badly.  “I got scratched by the thorns,” he mentioned, in passing, on his way up the hill.  No quivering in fear at the sight of his angry mother, no tears from the pain of the bleeding scratches, no concern for his discarded Big Wheel.  Jack was hollering next to us, vibrating with indignation at his brother’s blatant disobedience, and also somewhat excited about the bleeding scratches, which needed a BANDAID NOW MOM HE’S BLEEDING!!! AND ALSO HE NEEDS A TIMEOUT.  Liam proceeded on, untouched by the drama, paying attention to neither of us, holding his bloodied arms away from his body and walking uphill to the house trailing a sputtering older brother and a silent, utterly nonplussed mother.  I did not know then (and still don’t now) how to address both his transgression and his injury with any kind of dignity in the face of such self-assurance.

Liam has twigged, at the age of three, that there really is no way I can make him do something he doesn’t want to do.  Though I can shove vegetables in his mouth, I cannot make him chew and swallow them.  He chooses to chew them up, or let them dribble out, or (more often than not) surreptitiously spit them on the floor for the dog to clear up.  I cannot force him to do the former – I can only withhold things he wants (like dessert) or otherwise create some kind of consequence for his decision not to eat his vegetables (like timeout, or early bedtime, or sitting at the table in front of his cold food for hours).  Liam is very good at cost-benefit analysis – would he rather choke down vegetables, or skip an ice cream sandwich?  Whatever his choice,  you can be assured that he has assessed the relative merits of each path, and chosen the one that suits him.

Although this makes keeping him alive and healthy a bit of a challenge at times, the truth is I absolutely love this about Liam.  He has better critical thinking skills than most adults I have met in my working life.  He makes very well-considered choices and copes well with the consequences.  Clear-eyed is a better term for him than strong-willed – he does not try to overcome anyone else with his worldview.  He’s more a mountain than a steamroller.  In this way he is very much like his father.

I forget, then, sometimes, that he’s just three, and that despite his self-assurance he still needs tons of assurance from his mama.  He still needs lots of cuddles.

When he was small, before he was walking, he’d often grab my lower lip, bring his face close to mine, and suck his thumb, leaning his weight into my cheek.  Or he would gather up a hank of my hair in his fist and rub his fingers soothingly along it, as his brothers have done with a soft blanket or lovey.   I used to be his lovey, until he got too big for me to hold on a regular basis.  Up until the last month of my pregnancy, I still carried him down the stairs to breakfast every day, his head on my shoulder, though we haven’t been able to do that since Christmas.

Lately, he has been striding off into the figurative thorns more often than not, creating consequences for himself that require me to be most unpleasant.  Meanwhile, I tell people again and again that he’s taken the addition of New Baby in stride, without any jealousy or spotlight issues.  It occurred to me a couple of days ago that he probably keeps choosing Thorns over Safety because of the said baby, and perhaps he isn’t taking it all quite as in stride as I keep saying.  It occurred to me a couple of days ago that we haven’t cuddled together in a while, I haven’t bathed him or clothed him or read him a story in a long time, since probably about a month before the baby’s birth, which is an epic amount of time for a kid his age.  He hasn’t asked outright for these things, of course, but maybe the thirty-five year old can offer what the three year old doesn’t know to ask for.  Maybe he chooses Thorns and Mama Yelling, because he’d rather have chosen my distance than to choose closeness and have me be the one to turn him away, my face always turned to the newest, neediest son.

So anyway, I’ve hugged him a bunch in the last couple of days.  I notice when he creeps up next to me on the couch to cuddle and I cuddle the shizz out of that kid.  He chooses not to eat his vegetables and I call him over to me and wrap him in a huge hug and tell him that today I really don’t care, he can leave them on the plate.  He declines to get dressed in the morning and I pull him up on the couch next to me, dress him myself like he’s a baby again.  When he’s all dressed he leans his weight into me, sucks his thumb, and we sit like that for a minute or two before it’s time to tumble off into the day.

Liam is a paradox.  He is a lone mountain that does not want to be alone.  The further he pulls away from me, the more he needs me to pull him back.  So I will be a stream, wending my way around him, wrapping his foothills in a silvery ribbon, keeping him company, always.  Of my boys, Liam and I are least alike, and so we complement one another beautifully.  He is my very favorite son.

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I hurled a pacifier across the room last night at about 3 am.  Craig, who has recently settled into a pretty good day-and-night routine, last night totally blew the routine out of the water and was up and nursing every hour or so, fidgeting and fussing and infuriating the crap out of me.  I of course cannot hurl him across the room, nor can I reason with him.  And so I threw that paci with all of my might, and then I gently gathered my baby into my arms and nursed him for what must be the eleventy millionth time since he first slipped from my body and breathed.

The eleventy-million-and-one nursing occurred this morning, when I pulled him to my bed and tried to nurse and snooze simultaneously, desperate for a minute or two of sleep.  He blew out an explosive poop all over the sheets, forcing me to change him and me and the bed.  I did those things and settled him into a rocker, at which point he pooped again, grunting with the pleasure of it.

I was settling my head into my hands and preparing to weep at the Sisyphean task of keeping us both clean, when he cooed at me.  I picked my weary head up from my hands, peered at him over the tips of my fingers, and there it was – that smile.  He beamed at me, his mouth wide open.  His eyes shone prettily, oh his eyes are so pretty.  He gathered his hands up into fists and flailed them around, grasping in my general direction.  His mouth, his breath, his diaphragm – he threw his whole little body into trying to figure out how to use those muscles to make sounds, how to talk to me.  I gathered him up, poopy diaper and all, and set him on my knees, and together we practiced the rudiments of human conversation.

Later, in the daylight, when I nursed him again, he hepped and grunted and squirmed and squeaked, and then slowly settled down.  His eyes closed and he unclenched, his body softened into my soft belly.  I hooked his impossibly tiny fingers around my index finger . . . smoothed the cowlick in his fuzzy baby hair . . . patted his little bum, ran my thumb along the groove of his foot, pinched each wee little toe.  I hummed at him, and he squeaked at me, and we sighed together, relaxing into each other.

He is so small, so impossibly needy, so dear and little and trying so hard to be big, already.  He is my littlest, my love, my exhausting dear heart.  He is my very favorite son.