kiwords

My mom always told me that children know their parents better than anybody, but that to the parents, their children are forever a mystery. When I became a mom, I doubted that. I took to the care of a newborn with surprising ease, and if there was anything I understood, it was my tiny, perfect Tre. I knew when he’d be feeling hungry soon, I knew if he was stressed because there was too much noise, I knew what he needed and when. I couldn’t always GIVE it to him, but I knew.

I didn’t just enjoy my baby, I studied him. I collected facts about my son, facts that only I, his mother, could fully understand.

When Tre is frightened by something, he doesn’t cry, but sits entirely still and stares at it with a ferocious intensity.

If Tre is overtired, he shows it with frantic activity, in a desperate attempt to stay awake.

Things like that. I knew my son, better than anyone.

Somewhere along the way I must have blinked that dangerous blink everyone always talks about, because my tiny, perfect baby is nearly 10 years old. I continue to study him, and I know more facts about him than anyone else in the world.

I would be lying if I said I understand him.

Tre is studying Latin. Now, I don’t know Latin, so he’s learning from a workbook and DVD, and it’s going very well. He sits down with his book and watches the woman on the DVD, and simply ABSORBS it. I lurk around the edges of this, his experience, peeking at his conjugated verbs, listening to him chant new words. He’s bypassed me in this area, and he’s not even fully aware of it. When he can’t remember the translation for a Latin phrase, he’ll ask me what it is. When I admit I don’t know, he looks taken aback, then turns to his book for the answers. Latin works with his mind, in a way I (with my far less linear mind) will never understand.

Like the piano. He and Max started taking piano lessons a few months ago. I figured Tre would do well, as he approaches new tasks with a dutiful attitude. But Tre has far surpassed duty. He loves the piano. The first song he learned by heart was “Yankee Doodle,” and he can hardly pass a keyboard without playing it. He plays it as fast as he can, he moves up or down a little on the keyboard and picks out the same song in a different key. When he walks through the room with the piano, he is almost helplessly drawn to it, his fingers marching through scales on their way past. I knew he’d enjoy the piano, but I find that its music is feeding him – when I didn’t even know he was hungry.

Yesterday he was sitting at the kitchen table, working on some school work. He and his brothers had been building forts out of all the pillows in the house earlier that day, and he’d ended up with the pillow from his bed resting on the chair next to him. As he turned from one book to another, he reached over and picked up his pillow. Without thought, he raised it to his face and drew in deeply the smell of it. His eyes closed for a second, then he moved on to the next task. He didn’t know I was watching, amazed at my baby’s ability to find his own items of comfort.

As I watch him grow up so fast, remembering the newborn he once was, I get the sensation of his life being a spiral. It started so small and tight, within the safety of my cupped hands, and as he grows, it gains momentum and strength, spinning wider and wider, outside my grasp. I watch him exceed my reach, higher and faster and stronger. He is far beyond what I could contain.

But then I remember his clear eyed gaze on the day he was born, and I know he really always was.