Or the Start of a Letter I won't Send
Dear Elias,
I am late in writing your birthday letter. I keep putting it off because 12 is not easy, it comes with mood swings and hormones and upheaval and unrest-- and I find myself looking at you as a different kind of being than the little boy I once held to my breast.
Who is this child with hands larger than mine? This boy who can eat four salmon salad tacos for breakfast and still have room for salami and toast. Who says thank you without prompting one moment, and smacks me in the gut the next.
Elias, I write about you often, and lately my posts have been more brick than air. More hurricane, less rainbow.
And yet despite the weight and the wind, I won't stop loving you.
Not now. Not ever.
You should just send him away, someone essentially told me through Facebook. Stop feeling guilty and show some compassion for yourself and your daughter.
And oh, Elias, how her words worked their way under my skin, into my nerves, through my veins, and settled in the chambers of my heart, only to make me want you here in our home to the tenth degree times all the questions you have ever asked multiplied by the number of times I have said your name.
The morning after I read those words, you sat on the bench, brow furrowed, saying, 'I don't want to go to school today."
And I embraced your resistance with the patience of a thousand elephants, for I saw you not in the light of stormy weather, but as this miraculous almost teenage boy finding his way in a world that will never be easy.
And yet here you are, rising in the morning, all on your own, to start another day.
Even though its hard.
And I too shall rise.