I am sitting on the front porch with my laptop, running through my outline, preparing. The door opens and Jack marches out, followed by his morning nanny. He is wearing a green and brown striped shirt, brown linen shorts with a beige drawstring, little boy flip flops with elastic along the back to keep them on. The nanny (Laura) has slathered him in sunscreen and perched his purple and orange Clemson baseball cap on his head. He smells of coconut, and he is carrying a bouncy ball that he can barely get his arms around. His knees are scabby, his legs and arms nut brown. His hair is already turning that whiter blond that it becomes in the summer.
He sees me and immediately diverts to where I’m sitting at the patio table, and says “Hi!” in the surprised, sweet, openly friendly way that he says this to every single person he sees. Though he stands about two feet away from me, he waves wildly, as if I am distant, as if we are miles apart. He is trying to hold his enormous ball under one arm while he waves with the other. “Are you going to the park, buddy?” I ask, and Laura says “Yes we are!” “Are you taking your ball to the park, Jack?” I ask, and he says “Ball!” and holds it out to me.
“Bye bye! See you soon!” I say, and he says “Nye nye! Seesoon!” and turns to walk up the path. He gets about halfway, then turns back to me. “Nye nye! Seesoon!” he says again. “Bye bye, baby!” This goes on for several rounds, until we decide that he won’t willingly leave me behind, and Laura hoists him up into his stroller and rolls him away. He waves and cheerily shouts “Nye nye!” until they have left the proscenium arch stage of my small porch, and I sigh, and wish I could go along.
I ache with love for this nut brown boy, his marching legs, his coconut smell. Sometimes when he leaves me, even for a short trip to the park with his nanny, even just a few blocks away, I feel a remarkable sorrow, a huge tug on my heart. There are mornings – many mornings – when I thrill at the sight of my relief coming up the sidewalk, when I hand him over happily so I can have a few hours to study, take a shower, go to class, read my casebooks. Often, Patrick and I have words over whose night it is to read stories before bed, and sometimes bedtime comes a little earlier when I just can’t take anymore toddler antics. These moments are part of parenting, and I feel no guilt about having them. This little dude is exhausting, and the guaranteed morning breaks are a vital part of my parent-student balance – would be vital even if I wasn’t a student, even if he was my only real obligation.
There are the moments, though, when I’m so ridiculously proud of my little boy, the jaunty tilt of his baseball cap, the dimples in his chubby hands, and I want to bind him up in my arms and drink in every bit of him. It’s cliche to say it, but I’ll go ahead – I wish I could freeze him at this age now and forever. He is every inch the boy I want him to be, and he is still mine and his father’s, very much ours, but growing away. The distance between us is still a couple of feet, but one day it will be miles and miles, and there are moments when I can’t bear the thought of seeing him seldom, maybe only a couple of times a year, when he has his own family, when he has his own life.
As he grows, I’ll find something to be proud of in every stage. My heart will thrill even as the dimples in his hands fade away, and whiskers begin to grow on his chin. As his hair darkens from blond to brown, and then lightens again to gray. You can see the schizophrenia of my mother love if you read my previous post, in which I can’t wait until he and Angus (not his real name) are teenagers tromping home from soccer. Is there anything less rational than a mother enamored of her little boy?
Now I have the picture forever. The crooked, too-big hat, the enormous ball, the flip flops, the high-pitched seesoon, something he just learned to say. To pin down a little piece of his toddlerhood, hold it here, put it under a glass and look at it sometimes, gather it up with all the other memories, beads on a string that I finger, and handle, and clasp in my hands and smile over.
Precious to me, because they are mine forever and he is not.