SavageTimes

My son turned sixteen 13 days ago.

I think I’m still getting acclimated to the idea. Or maybe I am just so glad we are here. There was a time when he threatened suicide, tore into me with such anger and malice I didn’t know who he was.

He went to therapy resistant, but left after six months with something…settled.  He has never talked to me about those sessions.  He has said only, “Thank you for making me go. It helped.”

It’s not that he isn’t mature enough to be 16.  This is the kid his sister and I call our “80 year old.”  He accuses me of being a middle-schooler.  He’s my rock, my common sense, my partner in crime.

At 16, grounded, ready to tackle his future even if it terrifies him, able to accept my leadership in the house and respect me for who I am and what I do, supportive of me and his sister even while accepting and needing our support, I can easily call him a good friend.  We are fully able ot navigate the boundaries between mother and son and friends.

I’ve felt a kinship with him since around the end of my first trimester, when I first felt HIS presence: something that went beyond his fluttering movements and–what I am certain were his–cravings for meat, meat and more meat.

This kid will never be vegetarian.

There was a way he looked at the world, if you can say that, even then, when my womb was
his home.  I could feel him still and listening.  If he could see–maybe he could see light and shadow–he would be watching.  Two years after his birth, we spent inordinate amounts of time sitting on our hill outside the house watching cars go by, birds twitter in the trees, clouds move.

He will still lean onto the back of the couch and look out the window for moments at a time.  He looks like a man, leaning there, the hint of a beard glinting in the sunlight, his shoulders wide.

His infant self would fit across the breadth of his back.

When I was pregnant with my daughter, a friend gave me a photo of my son and I walking in the lake that last summer it was just the two of us.  We were holding hands and obviously in as intense a discussion as you can be with a three year old.  I have no idea what we were talking about.  But we did that a lot, just walked and talked.

Later still, when I started letting him take walks around the neighborhood, he liked me to come with him at least three times a week.  We haven’t held hands since he was 8 or 9.  But we still talked, anything from his ideas for stories to the current state of politics.

Now he comes upstairs when I get home from school and sits at the kitchen counter while I ready dinner and talks.  Or he calls me when I am doing errands, if I won’t be home until late.  Or, my personal favorite, he emails me during class at school, usually when he’s bored and often when he’s supposed to be doing something else.

He’ll run on about what is going on in his world, and then he’ll say, “Enough about me.  How is your day going?”

Someday, he will make an excellent relationship partner.

When I woke up 13 days ago, I remembered the first moments of his life outside my womb: he never cried.  His eyes were open: big, wide, baby-blue.  He just stared at everything going on around him, and then he laid his eyes on me.  He didn’t do anything miraculous or amazing.  He just stared.  But even then I felt like we recognized each other.

Even then, I felt like he was just waiting for the moment he could tell me about his day.