Velcro love

When my son was born, the first thing I noticed was how very present he was. It surprised me, frankly, to see him so awake and so alert, so intent on fixing his gaze on me. I had only seen fake newborns on TV, and on TV they are always wrapped in a blanket and their hands and faces are always scrunched up and they always seem to be squinting through half-closed eyes. My son’s face was smooth and open and his deep blue eyes were wide to the world, and the world was me. He was wide awake and he stared long into my face as if to memorize every detail, as if to put a face to the muffled voice he’d been hearing all those months through Thai-food-flavored amniotic seas. His eyes stayed on my face: this is the face, he seemed to think, that will shepherd me through life; I’d better remember what she looks like. He looked at me for what seemed a very long time and then must have approved of what he saw, for he rooted around and began to nurse. That gaze, though, took me by surprise. I hadn’t expected him to be so very present so very fast. It was conscious, that gaze, it was full of discernment and wonder. It said, So you’re the one.

Sometimes, in the morning after he wakes and we take him into our bed for a little while, I catch that look in his eyes still. He spoons up against me, his little rump tucked into my belly, my nose brushing his hair, his hand reaching up and back to hold my neck, sucking his thumb; then he cranes his neck and looks around at me and his eyes search my face. It is a gaze direct and frank and simple, as simple as childhood. Not even R has ever looked at me with such astonished wonder. So you’re the one.

He is attached to me in the extreme; we are two strips of velco. Sometimes I long for space; when it’s hot and I’m sweaty and he crawls onto my body and lies on my chest and sucks his thumb sometimes it makes me itch and I have to breathe deeply and slowly to find the physical patience to let him stay. Sometimes I know with bittersweet certainty that this time is coming to an end; when we go to the park and he runs laughing away from me, putting more distance between us than he or I have ever known. He runs away laughing, stopping now to look quickly over his shoulder, is she still there? before carrying on. He always circles back to me, a little planet in my gravitational pull, he is attached to me in the extreme, but his orbit grows ever so slightly larger with each pass he takes. I foolishly allow myself to think too far out into the future, he is leaving for college already, he’s broken orbit and found his own path. I have to pull myself back to these days to the here and now, to these days when I am the sun in his universe and he is the sun in mine.

To these days when our eyes meet in the morning and we think, So you’re the one.