My family is well past the years of binkies and boppies and deep into what I never imagined, let alone expected when I was expecting.
My 14-year-old son has a girlfriend.
Which doesn’t seem possible because wasn’t he just in in elementary school telling me girls are disgusting? And pre-k still seems not very long ago. That was when he asked me what marriage meant. I told him it’s when you get to live with your best friend forever, so he said he’d marry Robbie, his closest friend next door. That way, they could always play lightsabers.
My 14-year-old is gone now that he has a girlfriend
But overnight, the kid who – since elementary school – would come home and narrate the details of his day, then sit next to me on the couch thinking aloud while doing homework, is gone.
When he’s not playing baseball, he’s with her. And when he’s not with her, he’s in his room on FaceTime with her: explaining everything he did since he last saw her in school a few hours ago.
My husband and I heard her name and saw her picture many times before they were “Instagram Official,” which I think means boyfriend and girlfriend, but I’m still not sure.
There are so many things I want to tell my son’s girlfriend
There were so many things I wanted to say to her, because she knows my son at this moment, and everything that came before could only be experienced through time travel or her imagination: that James hardly cried as a baby, and spent entire afternoons playing alone as a toddler, never asking for a thing.
He went through a dress-up phase, a matchbox phase, a Pokémon phase, and a time when his plastic Star Wars figures battled silently with each other for hours before he got out of bed.
To understand him, she should probably know that ever since pre-k he would ask how my day was when I came home from work. And his kindergarten teacher always praised him for being “a calm and steady friend.” In fourth grade he won a certificate of excellence for chillness.
By fifth grade he was playing drums—that now gather dust in the basement–in a rock band called “Rated R.”
I want to tell my son’s girlfriend that he’s the kind of kid who always says ‘thank you’
Also, I wanted to tell her, he’s the kind of kid who says thank you to my husband or me after every single meal, and offers to carry whatever’s in my hands, even though these are not things we ever told him he needs to do.
I worked long hours when he was small but remember one day, I took off so we could go to the Bronx Zoo together. It was the aardvark that captivated him most of all and he kept looking for a way past the plexiglass, so they could touch.
In the photograph it looks like they finally did.
Now that my son is a teen I wish I had taken off more time when he was little
Now that he’s a teen, I understand I should’ve taken off so many more days. In fact, if I could, I’d raise him all over again, but this time pay attention to every single moment.
I wanted her to know all of this, because she’s captured his heart – even though she doesn’t know anything about baseball – and every previous version of him is somewhere inside, yet also long gone.
But when I came home one day and heard they were watching TV in the basement, all I could manage to say was, “Hi, I’m James’s mom.”
It was up to him to share the rest.
Today, he picked wildflowers for her and bought Lays potato chips, Snapple and Skittles for a picnic in the park. She was bringing the sandwiches, he said.
When I drove him to her house, he scrolled through his phone in the backseat, only looking up to complain about my playlist. I said, that isn’t something that someone getting a ride should do and he apologized.
Since I had his attention, I asked if he remembered all the times he told me girls are disgusting.
“They still are,” he said.
When I looked in the rearview mirror, I could see the little boy once again, cracking up at his own joke.
That was something else he used to do. For a moment he was here again.
Then, he was gone.
The author of this post wishes to remain anonymous.
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Grown and Flown
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