My boy started school last week. I wasn’t ready for it.
I mean, logistically speaking, I was, thanks to my organized and thoughtful wife. He’s got a nice backpack, new clothes, and new shoes to fit his growing feet.
What I wasn’t ready for is the sudden awareness that time is accelerating. That my oldest is becoming a big boy. I’m struggling with it.
The speed of it moves at a crawl when you’re a kid yourself. Slides a little faster as time goes on. You don’t notice it all that much. I think because you’re mostly focused on yourself. But a child is a daily reminder of the passage of time, and when the awareness of that finally arrives, it blindsides you. It’s like when you are really drunk and the world is spinning and it feels like you might fly off the earth’s crust unless you lie flat on the ground and grab hold of the grass. I wasn’t ready for that.
So I’m holding on to the grass, feeling my stomach drop as this thing spins away. The little boy is standing over me. He’s getting bigger in a blur. When he was a baby he was so small because he had trouble feeding at first. He would cry so much and I would pace up and down the hallway at night for a long time with him in my arms so that he would sleep. I think I did it for hours some nights but it passed so easily because I was carrying the world wrapped in a blanket.
I don’t think you can anticipate how to handle this, or maybe it depends on how you grew up. My dad died before I could ask him for advice, not that I think he’d have much. It wasn’t his style. He was just from a different world, where men only talked about their feelings, if at all, after a lot of beers, or much stronger spirits—and even then, there was very little said. The music he listened to when he got drunk said more: ranchera, the country music of Mexico. He was a big fan of Vicente Fernández, basically Mexican George Strait. As it turns out, George called Vicente one of his heroes. Dad would blow out his speakers playing Por Tu Maldito Amor in the garage. Mom hated it. I did as well. Then I started listening to George Strait.
Growing up with an emotionally stunted father didn’t stunt me, oddly enough. What it did do was make me talk to my son a lot because I did not want him to miss out on having help navigating the weird world of childhood. I’ve written down things he’s said over the years. Sometimes little kids speak in poetry.
I have this image of him as a baby. We’re sleeping together on the floor. I’m on my back; he’s on my chest, not much bigger than my forearm. I close my eyes and remember how small he felt there. Everything spins again. Now he’s much taller. Legs like little stalks, growing all the time. He came home with a book from the library about dragons and asked if magic is really real. It caught me off guard. I didn’t know what to say for a moment while he was thumbing through the pages.
I see him again. Three years ago. He still has all his baby teeth. We’re playing in the living room with a fort made out of couch cushions. I am the dragon, and he is the knight. He comes out from behind the ramparts at me with a wooden sword and shield we got on Etsy from some lady in Lithuania. With a valiant shout, he strikes me down. I roar as I fall, and he squeals at the thud. He is laughing so much. Again he says, again. I want him to always be this happy.
We’re back in his room. He’s on the bed, looking at a picture of a knight facing off against a dragon. I tell him there are different kinds of magic. Like love. That is real.