Dear Silas

Forgive me. After so many posts about your sister, even this blog makes you into the second child, riding on the coattails of whatever else is going on.

It isn't like that, though. Not at all.

Silas, I don't know how we came to this place. Suddenly you are three years old, and with a voice: you have opinions, and questions, and grasp at words to try and climb your thoughts.



For so long, you were the baby: we shaped the day and you swam in the midst. Now you go off to preschool, have your own experiences, and talk to people I've never met. When I ask you what you did all day it's always "I played and played and played." Such mystery, this sending you off and out. What are you playing at? Trucks? Dinosaurs? Ships and gentleman's politics? You won't tell me, so I always have to guess.

And then, suddenly, you crack a window. You point to your drink at dinner and laugh and laugh because it's fish juice, and it dawns on me that's what your preschool teacher calls water, because I forgot to send in juice with your snack.

"I have bees on my tongue," you said to me yesterday, holding my hand as we snuck out for lunch. How? Why? You didn't know.

Last night, late, your drowsy, soapy-smelling head next to mine on your pillow: "Bees on my tongue, Mommy. Still they are there. They didn't leave."

Oh, to be with you on your pillow. To be tucked up under the eaves as you're tucked under your covers, beneath construction truck sheets and a monster comforter with every baby blanket you've ever owned, every toy and book of the moment. We come up at 1:00 AM to shift the piles and adjust your little body, contorted around half a library on outer space.

When you wake up, we have to carry all of it with us. When we walk your sister to school, you agonize over what to take, what to leave.

"My things! My things!"

You are cranky in the mornings, still. We are cranky together, clinging to each other like barnacles while your father and sister breeze around us. We rock and don't speak. You snuggle into my neck. Barely, just barely, I can tuck the whole of you up onto my lap and chest, just like when you were a baby.



Barely, just barely, you arch your back and stretch like a newborn when I tiptoe up to ease you from your nap. The ghost of your infancy grows fainter and fainter every day.

In five days, I will be thirty five. You are three. You are the second, and you are the last, and you are so precious and just a little bit small, still.

It will only last a minute.



You sister chatters and chatters. Mostly, she directs the play, but yesterday she wanted to color inside so it was you and me in the early autumn afternoon. The picnic table was our rocket ship. Over and over we jumped on top, sat together, you yelling "Activate!" as I blasted us off. Saturn, Venus, Mars, Mercury-- all had the same mysterious playground, mudpies, alien dinosaurs. They chased us and we ran.

We held hands. You protected me. "Hide here!" you said, barely breathing. "Wait! OK, Mommy. I think they're gone."

I know it's my job to protect you. Everything about my life is set up that way. But the way you stretch and grow into something that's just yourself, without a bit of help from me-- it is as frightening as it is wonderful.

Keep holding my hand, little boy. Just a while longer. Let's play again this afternoon, orbit the yard, and finish the day together, singing.

At bedtime, I change the words to "My Favorite Things" into a rocket ship song. A song with you in space, blasting off, going to planets and seeing the stars. We have a parade. We have ice cream. I kiss you, and you smile so hard into the dark.

You drift off to sleep and that's more I can't possibly know. You are old enough to dream your own dreams. I am old enough to know what a gift I hold in my arms, when I tuck you up into them.

You still fit there, but just barely.



I will hold you for as long as you do, and longer.