A Love Letter to My Son On His 10th Birthday

 

You are an impassioned visionary.

Audacious, at times. A lightning bug, electric, energy radiating off your frame vibrates the air around you.

Unrestrained by assumptions.

A rope is not a rope to you. It is a belt, a bracelet, a lasso, a snake, a harness, a bungee, a headband, a halter. Paper is not something just to write on. It is a tool, a medium, a vehicle. You are builder and designer, architect and engineer, artist, innovator, chief imaginatron.

Unwavering in commitment.

You fight for your own way – what you believe to your core is right and true and yours. We’ve bent that will, a bit. Straining over that ferocity as a potter to the clay. Ever shaping, never breaking. A gentle curve is far more challenging, sweet son, than had we simply forced you into a mold. But your rough edges are wearing down, and in their place, fluid curves emerge. Where there was once only self, compassion. Where there was once only wilfulness, there is now integrity.

That same ferocity and faithfulness to your beliefs will do well for you, in time. Hang on to what is right, fight for it as you once fought for your own way.

Already, you are empathetic for anything and everyone. Even the most dastardly of villains earns your regret as he is destroyed by the good guys in the end. “I feel bad for him, mom. Nobody deserves to be treated that way.”

Even the snails I viciously fling from my garden earn your sorrow. “They are all God’s creatures, mom.”

Blonde hair, aqua eyes. You proudly show off arms so lean that the sinews and muscles holding you together are more visible and ripped than any body-builder could ever hope to be. Like a spider, elbows, knees and long limbs, folded under Yellow where you lay turbaned by the soft blankies you still swaddle around yourself in your nest at night.

You never seem to pay attention, but the words and the numbers and the phonics all make their way inside, somehow, and you astonish us with your knowledge of planets and geometry and cuttlefish.

Just today, we talked of chromosomes and genetics, and why you have blonde hair but your father and I do not. Then we went on to discuss the solar system, and which planets are not planets at all, but just a mass of gases. Your mind boggles mine. How you absorb information, process it, and comprehend in ways that I cannot.

You are poetry, a symphony, knit together in unfathomable ways. You are rogue and warrior, performer and perplexer. A “tween” now, the years are moving faster than ever before. Today you are 10. Tomorrow, you’ll be 20.

I stare into your thin cheeks and try to see the chubby-cheeked blondie that snuggled in my bed every morning.

If I look carefully, he is there.

But more often I see the square-chinned, broad-shouldered man blooming within your frame.

I stop breathing for a moment with the wonder and fear of what lay ahead, and regret for what is already behind.

Are we up to the task? For the rest of the journey that is only perhaps ten years more, of loving and guiding and shaping and molding before sending you off into the world with a childhood that was safe and supportive and worthwhile?

I want you to greet the world with a happy childhood tucked into your pockets, but more than that, I want you to be equal to what life will hand you when you eventually leave our nest.

I pray you will have confidence that you are equal to the task. Persistent to pursue your goals and dreams despite the setbacks and challenges and failures yet to come. That you will find love, a partner to stand by you, to shore up your weak spots and lean on your strong ones. That you will never, not for one single moment, forget that you are

wholly

madly

deeply

unconditionally

loved.

Not just by your father and I, or your grandparents, or the myriad of others in this village that has raised you, but by God, who exceeds all of that love and a thousand times more.

Forever, you are and always will be, enough.

For now, I brush the hair off your forehead and breathe in the scent of childhood that lingers and whisper a prayer of gratitude that we were chosen for these small hours,

to be the caretakers that prepared you for the world,

that we were given the privilege

of you.

Read more! The Day We Met.

Grace and peace be yours today in abundance!

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