It's Sunday morning, snowing. My body has been sending me every sign that heavy cream, butter, wine sauces, meat, and sugar must cease and yet I retreat to my desk with a second rich hot peppermint mocha, the sound of geese in a forced murmurmation flying over our house because another happy dog has just been let loose in the park across the street. I wish for silence as I type this morning but Theo has just come upstairs and turned on his radio. A mix of rap and hip-hop slings down the hallway and it occurs to me that this is completely developmentally inappropriate for him. But once - and perhaps still - a lover of baby, it's sweet down here on the west side, I find myself in his room doing a little old school shakedown of my own. It's snowwhite-bright and he's already moved on to another room, Lego building resumed. I turn the radio off, maybe or maybe not before a few more dance moves, and decide that it is of no real harm, this music right now. He's not lingering and hanging on every word. He's experimenting with feeling bigger, older. And I am quickly realizing that if he sees me liking it he will probably scatter just like the geese.
Birds flying high, you know how I feel.
But then he comes to me and sinks into my lap. He takes my hair between his thumb and index finger and twirls it. He has a project coming up at school, a presentation where he will speak in front of his class for five minutes about a changemaker. He wants me to help him brainstorm ideas and when I give him some along with a few suggestions on how to say these things, he stops me and says, "But Mom, I want my words to be juicier than that." I melt. I silently send up a prayer, so thankful for his teacher this year, who has turned out to be nothing short of magical.
And then there's the other one. He speaks to me these days of mutagen ooze and loves trainspotting for "garfeeti". If I haven't responded to his words within ten seconds, he asks me if I've "acklodgens" him? The far end of our dining room table has officially become his office; he is almost always there, drawing and coloring and cutting. He's experimenting with a case of the bossies, developing his self-confidence as both a four and half year old and little brother. It's both beautiful and maddening.
We are in this new place where the tide of our life comes and goes each day, together and separate and always back to together as the moon rises. I am awake and feeling a calm that is not unlike exactly how I feel when I sit at ocean's edge and let the saltwater lick my bare, warm feet. In the movement of our everyday, I have found something that resembles my sea - my true home - here in this land that sits just below the silver-tipped mountains.
