the edge of seventeen

I'm sitting outside holding a baby. At work. Preschool. It's hot, the sun is beautiful and glorious and radiating into the sleek arms and legs and faces of little children playing all around me. It's later in the afternoon, some children are tagging around the gate, subdued, waiting for Mom, Dad, Grandma. The leaves are lime green. Adult faces are sagging. Tired, but cheerful. I am present. I am happy. And then I see my son. My Dakota. My boy. My first baby, my singleton, the baby I had all alone to myself with no Daddy to have to share him with. This is the way I remember it, in my heart. I didn't have to share him. I slept with him against my heart and rib and breast and certainly it would be fair and true enough to say I have never quite put him down. Although he will be seventeen this month, over six feet, beautiful blue eyed blonde haired bright faced laughing son. I easily understand the crazy mother of literature who keeps her son living at home and sabotages his relationships, I am a few rock skips across the lake from her. Because he was my first love, and because I had no man to share him with, and because he saved my life. I cannot help that. It is the way it happened for us. I still have his preschool teacher's letter home that said he was the best and sweetest child she had ever had in her class. And it is a testament to my heart then that I thought Of course he is. My son at two years old said please and thank you and when going to do something he wasn't sure of, paused and looked at me to see if I would nod yes or no, and when it was no, he listened. My son at three years old waited patiently for me in stores because he understood and was able to carry out taking turns. He rescued lizards. He danced with me. He loved pink clothing and wore pink nailpolish until four years old. He loved Star Wars, legos, magnets, dinosaurs and Pokemon cards. He loved reading and being read to. He had an old soul. He made direct and constant eye contact when conversing. He woke in the middle of the night scared and said Momma I need you, and then when I held him told me, Momma I know you will always help me when I need you, no matter what. And I cried and held him tighter and when he was fifteen and making everyone around him hate his guts, I heard his little voice in my head saying this to me and I held him tighter.
So when I saw him on the playground, in my mind, the way he used to be, somehow it was the right moment with the right angle of the sun and the right drowsy openness of my heart and I was completely and totally stunned to realize I will never see that little boy again. Do you understand? I had to cover my mouth. I had to close my eyes. I saw his curls. His blonde waves and curls, his little sweet pinchy smiling face, completely open and trusting and tiny. His little hands always in my hands. His awkward shorts, always too big for his tiny waist. My son's chin. His enormous blue eyes. His little boy mouth and the way he smelled around his neck and in his hair and his armpits. His tiny butt on my lap, his arms around his neck, my boy. I held my hand to my face. I realized that when we love our children, as children, we are loving a completely temporary being. Like the stars in A Wrinkle In Time. We are loving little human beings who will never be there again. We are putting our hearts and souls into the beginning of a person. And then that little person runs away with their heart and pulls it straight out of our chest until our entrails are flying behind them wherever they go however far they go and we are never comfortable or fearless again in the same way. That little person is in the bigger people. But it's not the same person, it's not a fairy tale where they are always there, because they are not, they change like everything changes, only so brutally fast, and that small sparrow boy I put my entire heart and soul and guts into is a soon to be seventeen year old man-boy who will never again be my best friend going to the bookstore four times a week to sit perfectly happy and almost silently for hours with his Momma reading in Borders until we went home to eat and flop into bed together and snuggle up close until that little boy said Momma you breathe too LOUD and turn the other way but make sure his feet are still touching my feet and fall asleep and I would read until I fell asleep- that little person is a memory and a flicker in my son's sweet face.
I felt a deep and profound sense of loss that was the loss of my son baby boy but also the recognition of loss that is inherent in good parenting and then even more so the deeper pain of recognizing how for us human beings loss is the bell that rings in our ears our entire lives until it rings for us and then we cannot hear it.
I cried today because for the first time I really understood that my son is going to leave.