time-lapse

I snuggle in bed next to him and he knows I'm too tired to tell a story tonight so for once, for once, he lets me off the hook from the usual magic metal pipes hiding under chimney bricks that lead alternately to underground lairs or to Mars. I curl into a parenthesis around his comma and I am bursting from my heart, out my eyes, through my arms -- none of me can contain the simultaneous blend of joyful-love and inexplicable longing. Longing for the impossibility of letting them grow while holding them here, longing for them to always feel this safe and this happy, longing for them to always love me as much, as fiercely, as fully, as uncomplicated-ly as they do right now. It's a drink that puckers my lips but leaves the sweetest aftertaste, this conflicting concoction of sheer joy and crushing weight.

I tell him a couple minutes more and he says count to 200 and I tell him I'm too tired to count out-loud and he says I will. And he does, this the first time I hear him soldier on past one hundred and I remember my father telling me how he remembers the moment in which he realized that he could always add just one more number and keep counting on and on as high as forever, and I think of my four-year-old and wonder if he'll remember these quiet nights in the dark, the swell of pride, the welling up of confidence, the delight of discovery as he counts in his perfectly articulated one-hun-dred-and-twen-ty-two, one-hun-dred-and-twen-ty-three, one-hun-dred-and-twen-ty-four....


My oldest son doesn't sing, he claims he can't sing, and three nights ago he laid in the dark and let melody spill out from his soul. They are learning Woody Guthrie in music class, and this seven year old boy was smitten with the redwood forests and the Gulf Stream waters. We blended voices and sang verse after verse back to chorus again in the dark and I told him it makes me so happy to hear you sing, and he said I really like the song and I like the way the guy's voice sounds when he sings it, the guy who wrote the song and I smile in the dark remembering that I played the guy's music for him as a toddler at naps and bedtime and I wonder if somewhere in his subconscious he remembers this, and I ask him why he wouldn't sing before and he says that this is the first time I like the way my voice sounds. I like how it sounds when I sing this song. And he tells me how another seven year old complains when the class sings that they are off-key but my boy tells me as sure as he's ever been about anything that it doesn't matter if you know the tune, it only matters that you're singing loud and having fun. We talk about how music touches our hearts, he tells me how it makes him feel good to sing, how the music is like a good kind of poison and when I tell my husband, he says like a drug? and I know that what they've said about music all of these years is true and I feel the swelling and the tightening, grateful for teachers and music that touch the hearts and souls of little boys.

My littlest calls to me in the depths of my sleep and I go to him, lifting him up and close, tucking him in beside me and he whispers roll over and I do, as I have done since he was the teeniest of babes, but this time without nursing him first, and my back is to his tiny body, his little fingers twirling my hair until his fist is at my scalp and thumb in mouth he mumbles I love you, Mama and together we drift, weightless.

They bloom before my own two eyes, in all their time-lapse brilliance.