MILESTONES AND GRIEF
To My Oldest Two Sons, As You Graduate From High School
Tiny Eulogies For Your Childhoods
Who Lives in the Pond? by Julie Aigner-Clark sits at the base of our stairs. It’s a puffy vinyl book for babies —that was, once upon a pond, for you. Our baby boys.
The page with the box turtle still carries your teeth marks.
My face crumples as I write this to you, our first two. The years seemed so long when you both were small. Now I wish there were more.
High school graduation is weeks away, and I’m beginning to understand why parents have a hard time letting go.
John. I remember the time you intentionally flipped over your big wheel, spun the pedals with your hands, and licked the gritty plastic front wheel as it turned. You’d found the preschooler’s version of Dirty Jobs, and it was awesome.
You move through the physical world in creative ways.
Taste-testing a big wheel was an unusual choice, but your explorations have always been uniquely yours.
You used both hands to double-point at the seaplanes when you were one. Your first spoken phrases were about the Blue Angels and how lightning-fast a bird once flew as our cat chased it.
Both of your grandpas are retired pilots, but even in them I have not seen such relentless passion.
How does it work? And how quickly can it move? You’ve always needed to know. Now, as you fly far from me to study aviation operations, I feel pride that you’re a grown-ass man with a flight plan.
And pain at the lulling of old breezes that blew through your downy newborn hair.
And Wes. You were born with long, narrow feet, like a rabbit’s. You could sprint like one from the time you were ten months old. But you do NOT have a rabbit’s quiet disposition.
You have always been here to “live out loud,” as writer Émile Zola once was. And like Tennyson’s Ulysses, you doggedly “drink life to the lees.”
I remember when you were almost four and your brother nearly five — and you worked together to lock a babysitter out of our house. (Somehow she was unwilling to return!) Then, there was the time that you and our neighbor-kid beheaded a whole bed of daffodils with scissors.
A Dennis-the-Menace type, though? More like Mel Gibson’s Braveheart protagonist — or the kid from Iron Will, with a free soul that loves to triumph, race, and win.
You are bright — oh so bright — independent, and fierce. Always driving at something, always insisting upon justice, fairness, and equality. Never backing down from hardships or challenges or adventure.
It’s no wonder your friends, your teammates, your teachers, and your siblings all seem to think the world of you.
As the clock ticks down for your game-time college decision, I hold my breath. In your life, Wes, there will be few timeouts — and even fewer doldrums.
I have a few regrets, too.
I’m sorry I barely let you boys watch TV until you were, like, eight and seven. If I could do things again I wouldn’t be so hardover about stuff: exclusively breastfeeding until I was too worn out to be a good mom. Trying so hard never to spoil you. Making you do workbooks in the summertime.
I would have bought you those lawnmower toys when you were two and one — the ones that brought you so much joy when you played at co-op. We didn’t have much money then. But some things are investments in happiness.
I would have treated my postpartum depression sooner, so that neither of you had to look into my crying face and hear me say that “Mommy’s sad” again.
The wild implausibility of your faces as you drew your first breaths, it startles me to this day. You were here, and thirteen months later you both were here. And we were no longer one flesh.
To wrap my mind around this is to turn over the last puffy, vinyl pages of your babyhoods and lay the box turtle down on the pond’s bank.
It marches away quicker than I can stand.
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