Searching for the Baby in the Boy

Nowhere in this photo do I see a baby. I look and study and blow it up to its maximum size but a baby isn't anywhere to be found. It's as if one night while I was sleeping someone exchanged my little bedbug for a child. A child who holds his preschool girlfriend's hand under the snack table and gives her all his favorite toys. A boy who insists on sitting and listening to every song in its entirety, even if it means sitting in the car with the engine running -- waiting for the song to end. A little person who builds towers out of Legos and paper towel dispensers and proudly shows them off. A kid whose ear can distinguish a violin from a cello, a saxophone from a clarinet -- slow on words, perhaps but quick on sounds and far more knowledgeable than I.

"Archer, listen! It's a trumpet!"

"No, not a trumpet, Mommy. Dis sound a French horn."

And he's usually right.

"Oh, sorry, Archer. I'm an idiot."

Babies don't tell their mothers they're wrong. Babies don't tell you they love you and make up "mommy songs" that they belt out on walks with the dogs. Babies don't pick dandelions from the weeds and say, "here, mommy, blow..." Babies don't stand on stools to wash their hands or practice pushing their baby sisters in strollers around the house.

"Cuz, Mommy? Der's a baby in there, in your belly and I give her a kiss like this... Mu-ah!"

Sunday, at a family reunion, I watched as my cousins swept Archer up into their arms, his eyes wide and grateful to be included in such childhood shenanigans. Only once did Archer find his way back into my arms, too thrilled with being wheeled around the museum in my Nana's wheelchair and eating crackers with the big kids amidst the Bamboo in the courtyard.

And the next morning, on his way to school, without being prompted, Archer asked if he could see his cousins, again. And babies don't do that either.

"You love your cousins don't you." I said.

"Yeah," Archer smiled, whipping his hair out of his face like a teenager.

"Tomorrow," I promised. "We get to see them tomorrow."

"Das cool," Archer said with a nod and I laughed because it always sounds funny to hear him say "cool" or "awesome" or "later skater" because those are things that I say. And every time I laugh Archer laughs, too. "Thas funny, right?" he says, even if he has no idea what has prompted my giggles.

I decided to take Archer out of school for the month of August, so we can have adventures just the two of us: our last hoorah as partners in pigeon-chasing, sidewalk-kicking crime before the baby comes. The baby. And I can't believe I'm going to do this all over again: have a baby, watch her grow, become a little girl; A child; Her own person with hands to hold and instruments to recognize and towers to build all her own.

I can't believe that three years from now, I will look upon the photos of a face not yet before me with the same pain, longing, and where-did-the-time-go tears that I have right now, looking at these seemingly grown-up pictures of Archer: My beautiful son, child, little boy, whose hazel eyes once followed my every move. And now? Every day it is made more clear that I am no longer the center of his world. Instead he has created his own: a magical place where violin-playing dragons blow dandelions and mommies aren't (always) allowed. It is in this world where Archer will, over time, construct his wings.

I cannot believe that once upon a time, I held in my body, something so small. A magic bean I knew would grow, but not this fast. Into a child I knew I would love, but nowhere near this much.

He might as well be a thousand feet high, the way I look at him now. The way I know I will always look at him -- winding like a beanstalk up and into the clouds. Growing up and farther away, my love expanding like the universe around him as his eyes fill with stars.

GGC