He also picks his nose still, and threatened to sue me if I burned his pizza the other day. It's just that I don't write blogs about that.
There are many mom bloggers who find grace in the quiet, ordinary moments of our lives. Elevating what we, as moms, no longer even see or register and reminding us what acts of devotion and beauty and love folding laundry and going to work and cooking for our families can be - I admire it and I love reading them and my good dear friend Heather does it better than anyone over at the Mother Load (and if someone can tell me how to link to her blog, I would do it.)
But I cannot find grace in the quiet, ordinary moments of our lives because I'm often too busy thinking, "OH MY GOD, LOOK AT HOW ORDINARY WE ARE BEING! THIS IS AMAZING!"
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| No big deal...just climbing a mountain, y'all. |
Or my breath catches on the ordinary, sometimes. My eyes sting with it, and so, you see, the "ordinary," the intentional sass and the fuss about bath and the begging for one more story, it is not ordinary for me, for us.
But my son does still pick his nose. And the other day, I had an absolute screaming fit because my husband slept in on his day off and didn't finish his to-do list before I got home. And I made this crap awful white chicken chili, too. Just bad, you guys.
With that being said, OMG, GUYS, MY KID TOTALLY SAID SOMETHING EXTRAORDINARY THE OTHER DAY AND IT WAS AMAZING AND I AM TOTALLY GOING TO BLOG ABOUT IT.
I think most kids say a lot of amazing stuff. We just have to listen for it, and I have a thing about language - it is, as my son would say, my jam. I think about language a lot, and how it is used as both a tool and adornment, the same way that a pair of khaki mom-pants and a ball gown are both clothes. I read books on linguistics, and long before it became apparent that my son was different, I was absolutely fascinated by his own language development.
And I was thinking this morning, as I wiped little finger prints off the front of my fridge and fished little balled-up socks out from under the couch and tried my best to answer the never-ending barrage of questions from my kiddo ("How deep is Elk River? What happens if it's a thousand feet deep? Would we float? How many temperature degrees is the sun? Does baby Jack understand that I have walked this earth longer than he has?") about how often Junior frames his emotions in the context of his heart.
"This makes my heart so, so happy," he will say...over a Little Debbie snack. (I feel you, son.)
"I miss Mina in my heart," he will say in reference to his grandma.
And then it hit me. He trusts his heart. He trusts in because it never leads him wrong and because we praise it so constantly. He is, after all, my big-hearted kid, the child whose solution to the constant bullying he faces at school is to ask them to all be his friends and give them extra graham crackers.
But his brain? That betrays him daily, sometimes hourly.
"I hate my brain!" he'll say, punching himself in the side of his head as he looks at yet another pointless list of sight words.
"Why does my brain do this?" he'll tearfully ask me, the words taking an eternity to form and push out, after a long day at school has robbed him of his fluency.
And I think that may be our fault, since we often "pass the blame," so to speak, onto the fact that he has a neurobiological disorder.
"It's not you, dude, it's your brain," I have said lightly, without thinking much about it, never wondering what impact my words may be having on a child who is often highly sensitive to language, who takes word into the heart that he trusts so much and internalizes them deeply. I never thought that he would, instead of feeling relief that so many of his struggles are not his fault, begin to view his own brain as an enemy.
But his heart? That he trusts.
And I do, too.
He found me crying in bed earlier this month, on the anniversary of my dad's death. The light was turned off and guys, this was no delicate cry. This was an ugly cry, the kind of cry where your nose plugs up in both nostrils and the skin under your eye feels tissue thin. And although I needed a private moment, I don't want him to think of tears as being something he needs to hide, and so when he climbed up next to me and asked me what was wrong, I answered honestly.
I said that I missed my dad.
"My dad," I told him, "would have been amazed with you. You would have been best buddies."
"What did Grandpa Jack look like?" he asked, and I laughed a little before answering that he was little, wore a ball cap, and had a mustache.
"I have a great idea!" Junior exclaimed, and quickly exited. He has "great ideas" 348 times a day, and the swift dismissal after focused concentration is also common, and so I tried to get back into my ugly cry mode because, damn it, I really needed one.
A few minutes later, Junior was back. And again, he pulled himself into the bed. I could hear the rustle of paper and suddenly, there was a click and a small circle of light illuminated the lined piece of notebook paper clutched in my son's fist.
It was a picture of a smiling man, with a mustache (placed under the mouth, but no need to be picky, right?), drawn in ballpoint pen.
"I drew a picture of your dad so that you could look at it when you miss him," my son said. "That was my great idea."
"That was a great idea!" I said. "It's a really good picture, Bubby."
"Maybe someday he will come back," my son said hopefully.
"No," I said - we have been over this before. "He died, sweetheart."
"Oh," my son said. And then, "Oh! I know what happened!"
"What?" I asked, wearily. I was sad and tired and not quite ready for a Junioresque barrage of questions and strange dialogue.
"Your dad was like this," my sweet son said, the flashlight holding steady on the stick-figure picture of the grandfather he never met. "And then, he was like this."
A small, soft click, and the flashlight was turned off.
"His special light went off, didn't it," my son said, with an odd, tender sort of confidence.
And the tears came to me again. "Yes," I said. "That's exactly what happened. His special light went out."
"I wish I could make it like this for you," he said, turning the light back on.
"It's okay," I said. "The really good thing is that, when you lose someone you love, they stay with you in your heart."
And my sweet, literal son leaned in close to my chest and said, loudly, his words muffled against my shirt, "Your daughter misses you."
No wonder he trusts his heart. It's an extraordinary heart, after all, and I won't even pretend to believe otherwise. And his language is so often a language of love, of connections forged and made and held, expressed perfectly and with a maturity and fluency that I sometimes envy.
I do totally wish he would stop picking his nose, though, It's super gross and not at all cute.
