When he is looking forward to something – getting into the inflatable backyard pool, say, or putting on his running shoes – my son shows it. He grips his small hands into fists, grins widely, tenses up his whole body with anticipation, and says, “I’m so exciting!”
It’s unbelievable: so cute, so pure.
I want to remember this. I want to remember how he says, “I want to hold you” when he needs to be picked up. I want to remember how he recites his whole name, how he skips numbers when he counts, how he tells me stories, how he likes to hear my own.
Right now, he often says, “Tell me about the ‘mokin room,” and by that he means that he wants to hear about the time that we were given a room at a hotel in which someone had clearly smoked, so we asked to change rooms, and then we did. That’s the whole story, but he wants to hear it multiple times a day, asks for it so often that now I’ve tied it to a specific activity: I tell it when we brush teeth, and he listens intently every time. Once, on a winding road when he was exceptionally tired, I pulled it out as a last resort, hoping it would soothe him, and as soon as I started it, he became quiet and still, finally comforted.
We are traveling a lot this summer and I am missing home, missing the backyard where we spend most of our time, missing the familiar sounds of the too-early trash pickup on Thursdays, missing the daily habit of monitoring the hydrangeas, the snap peas, the failed attempt at lettuce. I’m learning something new about myself in this process of being gone so much, something about wanderlust married to homesickness. Still, my child is again teaching me about presence and about being in this moment, rather than looking backwards or forwards or sideways to some other place or time I am not in.
I know he misses home too – he asks to see me “do the mobile” every night, and I pantomime how I turn his felted raindrops above the crib when we are home – but he’s fully here, rather than being there. So I am aiming for that too.
As is often the case with writing, I hear him waking up, so I’ll end this here. I can’t wait to see him; he is, after all, so very, very exciting.
The Wandering Introvert 