When I was young, my parents told me they used to spend the evenings just watching me, play, sing, dance. I figured it was because they were young (in their teens when I was born) and poor and then as I got older, I thought, gee whiz, maybe they are a little simple and this is why they spent their evenings watching me play. Then I had my own kids.
When my first son was born, nothing delighted me more than to get my son to smile back at me. To have him track my face, recognize me and smile! I thought I knew love but no, not until that moment did I.
Then the challenge became making him laugh. When he laughed, I laughed and the two of us would go back and forth in this overflowing bounty of giggles and squeals, until there were tears rolling down my cheeks and I was out of breath from the absolute joy of it all. Who the heck had I become!? Now I understood my parents were not simple, they were amazed.
Then he learned to eat.
When my husband would get home from work, the two of us put great thought into what we would feed our son next. I remember his first tastes of yogurt. It seemed as if he wasn’t quite certain he liked it. He made a questioning face, brows furrowed, eyes narrowed, then opened his mouth for spoonful after spoonful. The first time we fed him meat, he moaned like Peter Boyle as the monster in Young Frankenstein, prompting my husband and I to find other foods that would produce other surprising responses.
When our second son was born, all three of us liked to watch him eat. Watching him attempt to pinch small items like blueberries or Cheerios, then raise them to his mouth was like watching one of those Claw Machines at the arcade. Would he do it? Would the food make it into his mouth? When it did, the three of us would cheer, completely unironically, like it was the most spectacular feat known to man and we were the fortunate three to have witnessed it.
My sons are moving into their teen years now and I am still entranced watching them move through the world. I watch as they discover art, film, books and music for the first time and I remember how these things gave me a view into a larger world. I love watching them laugh with their friends at something so small and silly but it hits them in that shared-experience sort of way that we can only barely remember from those teen years. I see too, how they navigate stupidity of their peers and sometimes the adults around them with so much agility and grace than I would at their age or do now as an adult.
And sometimes, I get an email or a text from another adult who sees these things in my boys too.
BTW, You have an amazing son.
Or
You are raising men who think for themselves and love others.
And then, nothing else matters. I wait for them to return from school, so I can just watch them grow.
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Undaunted Joy #45
And, o, those wonderful confusing beautiful painful moments when they express an opinion that has so little in common with your own world view....
My sons (10, 14) had the opportunity to process a deer. Feeling very proud of themselves after gutting, separating the hide, cutting up steaks (I am surely using wrong terminology here...), hands and shirts bloodied with big grins on their faces. Seemed to carry themselves a bit differently after that experience:)