"Maybe you could write about that . . ."

Last night, in those few precious moments before bedtime when there’s not a single chore remaining for me to ask him about, my son and I were taking just a moment to snuggle on the couch. I asked him to tell me something about him that I didn’t know – something he might not have ever thought to tell me. I was thinking I was being clever and that out would come some juicy things that I should know but he hasn’t deemed important enough to tell me, in that way that guys have of eventually telling fragments and bits of things, but never in the “tell me all about it” way with relational nuances, tips about how each person looked and the emotional feel of the information, that women crave.

“Why wouldn’t you know something about me?” he answered. I think he wasn’t sure if it was a real question. “There isn’t anything you don’t know,” he added, with his usual enormous, grin looking gummier with gaping holes from the teeth he’s recently lost. He snuggled in even closer, burrowing, really, as far as he could get without smushing his glasses.

“Did I tell you what our morning assignment was?” he said, from somewhere near my armpit.

“No,” I replied, animated. There was something. A tiny detail, a 15-minute span of his morning that, although I know in general that each school day starts with an independent writing assignment, he hadn’t told me that day’s assignment. It was to correct grammar, spelling and punctuation in an error-filled paragraph.

Of course, adding this small detail to the rest of what I knew about his day – his George Washington presentation through the paper-bag puppet we’d decorated over the weekend with fabric fragments donated from a much more craft-skilled mother than I am; cardio stations in P.E.; difficulty eating the burrito at lunch because of his new wiggly teeth; his karate class in which he didn’t get a chance to spar but did do a whole session of warm-ups; his struggle to type up the first paragraph of the body of his Easter Island report (the follow-up to the Tikis – check out how cool they looked at the final event)


– didn’t really add much to my knowledge of him. Except that he and I have a relationship where he still talks to me, still trusts me with the minutia as well as the great big messy things of his life, still thinks my input is safe.

He enjoys the fact that I know him. He’s not intimidated by it, doesn’t find it intrusive, doesn’t think there’s anything odd in it. He wants me to know him, as it is one of the ways he has come to know himself. And this knowledge doesn’t seem constraining or limiting to him. It makes him feel good.

This morning, before breakfast, we were talking about how difficult it is to be old and sick and alone (my Great Aunt, at 86, has taken ill – may she be blessed with healing). “Maybe you could write about that tonight,” said my son. He knows Tuesdays are my writing nights. I gave him my big, gummy smile, and a giant hug.

But Mom’s can’t burrow back into their children, so I’ll nestle later with my husband, and wrap myself in this memory, this little parenting victory.
My son knows me, too.