About a Boy

It's really hard not to write about him so sometimes I do. Sometimes he lets me take his picture and sometimes he turns his back to me or makes a face. Sometimes he asks me to follow him and sometimes he tells me to leave him alone but he always takes it back. 

"Leave me alone."

"I hate to be alone."

I am the same way so I leave and come back and leave and come back and leave and come back. I tell him I will always leave and come back and leave and come back and leave and come back.

I follow him down the street. He's on his bike and even though he doesn't need training wheels anymore he has them anyway. He's not ready so we let them be. This is a child I know not to push. He does everything on his own time. Like walking. And speaking and knowing all the answers. He knows the rules to every game and knows to stop at every driveway and scolds me when I do something wrong like run a red light or listen to the music too loud. 

"I'm your mother so you can't tell me what to do."

"But you're breaking the rules so I can."

"One day you will break the same ones."

"Never," he says. 

He thinks he knows everything. He's going to be seven in a couple of weeks and sometimes, when I correct his multiplication he gets angry because I'm wrong! But I'm right.

"Believe it or not, sometimes I'm actually right."

When we go places together he doesn't like to talk to me. He is silent most of the car ride home and on walks, doesn't acknowledge me. I speak to the back of his head and it bounces off his helmet and gets caught underneath a car. 

"Are you listening?"

"Where are we going?"

"Archer? Are you listening?"

And then, out of nowhere, a thought. About the universe and how we're all walking around in skin that's made of stars.

About growing up and how he doesn't want to, but sometimes he does. (You get to eat ice cream for dinner and build real life cities.) About intersections and why it's important to slow down when the light turns yellow instead of speeding up.

"Usually, yes. But there are other times...  Sometimes it's safer to run the light. Like, say, if I was stuck in the middle of an intersection... we have to use our best judgement, you know?"

"You can't break laws, Mom."

"It's more complicated than that."

"..."

I take his hand and he lets me hold it. He still lets me hold his hand. Even when he tells me that I'm wrong. Even when he pretends he isn't listening. Even when he asks me to look away. Leave him alone. Let him figure it out.

"Do you remember what it felt like to be a baby?"

"No. Do you?"

"No. But I remember being six. I remember my seventh birthday. I remember that I was wearing green OP shorts and these Keds you could color."

"Sometimes I don't want to tell you everything, Mom."

"I know."

He used to. He used to tell me everything and then repeat the same everything over and over and over a hundred thousand times, but before that, he didn't speak. It took him many years before he spoke, so in a way I'm used to listening hard to his silence.

His thoughts have always been loud enough to hear from across the room.

 

I don't need him to tell me everything anymore. I want him to have secrets. I want him to share, but only if he wants to. I don't need him to be my baby, just my son.

And yet. There are moments, like when he holds my hand, that feel like time travel. It doesn't matter that they don't last. That they won't, can't...

I cannot cling to him when he has already let go. All I can do is let him guide me toward our exit, help him buckle his helmet and follow him home.

GGC