10

Tomorrow Bobby is ten.

This seems like such a significant moment that it's hard to believe it’s going to pass with only an ordinary school day followed by a store-bought carrot cake and opening the one present he has left - a Gorillaz t shirt - since he opened the rest along with Theo on Theo’s birthday last week. But yes, he is ten, and I’ve kept this child alive for ten years and been a mother for ten years (whereas I was not a mother for thirty nine years - make of that what you will). 

What is Bobby like, on the eve of ten? Who has he become in these ten years? He’s smart, sensitive, empathetic, introverted, funny, sardonic. He’s got a jaded wisdom that belies his few years and comfortable life - I credit myself with this. He’s so much like me, and I’m so much like my mother, which means he’s like his grandmother who he never met. This also means he’s a bit like his great-grandmother who he also never met and who I only knew for fifteen years, because that’s how these things work. Somewhere in each of us is a gesture or turn of phrase or a look that probably goes back hundreds of years, out of this country, even. It’s funny to think of that. 

Of everyone in this house, we two are the only ones who had each other alone for nearly two years. He’ll never remember those heady early days of his life when it was just me and him and a cranky elderly chihuahua around here; those insane nights of sleeplessness interrupted by quick cat naps with my hand resting gently on his chest to make sure he was still breathing, every light on in the house all night to allay my postpartum terror, the sweet smell of life breathing in from the windows in the form of spring orange blossoms and lantana and jasmine, the parading around in circles as he screamed, singing The Cure’s All I Want -

Tonight I’m feeling like an animal

Tonight I’m howling inside

Tonight I’m feeling like an animal

Tonight I’m going wild

And all I want is to be with you again

And all I want is to hold you like a dog

We never could have imagined that one day there would be another little boy here, even less a grown man not of our flesh. Once it was just us. The weight of that is not lost on me.

Tomorrow he turns ten, with normal ten-year-old boy concerns - mostly revolving around how to get things; more Ipad time, more sweets, how to stay up later. How to avoid the boring things - cleaning up, brushing teeth, homework - and have more of the fun things. That’s what his life is about now, which is as it should be.

Every year of these boys’ lives that go by, I’m so pleased they’ve “made it this far” without any major traumas or losses; I feel like every year they continue in this vein, their brains can develop in a healthy manner. Even as I say this I recognize being proud of making it this far with no trauma is like being proud of making it this far without catching covid - it’s not an accomplishment; it just means that so far you’ve been lucky and that luck can run out at any time. It’s essentially meaningless. But as “being careful” with covid does mean your risk of catching it is likely less than those who don’t give a shit, so is being careful in your life - making good financial decisions (mostly), staying in one place, choosing good partners, looking after your health. All of those things have helped keep up the bulwark against life’s many tragedies. 

When I turned ten, I had just moved to New York after a year in Connecticut with my aunt and uncle and two cousins, a circumstance I still don’t entirely understand. Newly reunited with my mother after a year apart, we set off for a summer in Wisconsin for a yacht club cocktail piano gig in Bar Harbor. I don’t remember much about that summer except how much my mother resented being housed in the “help” quarters (shitty cinder block housing with constantly partying teenaged waiters) and once nearly drowning in the club pool because every time I tried to come up for air I was viciously attacked by hard-biting black flies. At that age I was relentlessly obsessed with everything Victorian and took to always carrying a handkerchief and a small velvet 100 year old purse; I was reading through the original Mary Poppins books (which are very different from the movie - a lot darker). And somehow on my tenth birthday that summer I spent the day in tears and inconsolable. Why? Because I didn’t want to grow up and was terrified of “losing my childhood”. This was an ongoing theme in my youth - I had a similar reaction to the arrival of my first period four years later. Where did this notion come from? I asked a therapist once - and she asked me how my mother presented adulthood to me at the time, and I responded…not very well. My mother was fond of responding to my childhood complaints with such phrases as “just wait until you’re an adult” or “get a job” or “you don’t know how easy you have it” etc etc. Which, to be fair, was pretty standard parenting boilerplate in the 70s and 80s - children couldn’t be depressed, or have anxiety, or be anything but carefree tousle-haired little rag mops. Nevermind that I’d just spent a year being traumatized by an evil boy cousin (who I hasten to add has grown into a delightful man) inexplicably separated from my mother while also having been abandoned by my father a few years before that, and had spent just about every year or few months since the age of five moving and switching schools. By ten I had lived a full life. I was exhausted. I think I was entitled to a few tears, especially faced with the prospect of my adulthood, according to my mother, being exponentially worse (spoiler alert - it wasn’t. I’m glad at fourteen I made the decision not to jump out of that window and instead live to find out). 

I’ve made a habit of never taking a “just wait until you grow up and see how hard it is” attitude with my kids, after seeing what it did with me. Occasionally I’ll wink at one of them conspiratorially and say, “adulthood is awesome - you’ll see”. I always hated the lack of control I felt as a child; I felt like my entire life was doing things I didn’t want to do and being places I didn’t want to be. I suppose most kids feel that way, and they’re not wrong; it’s just the nature of things at that age. You have to go to school, which has very few redeeming qualities; whereas as an adult you can luck out and actually enjoy your work, or at least aspects of it. You can eat candy all day and stay up all night if you want, but you’ll be surprised by how unappealing these concepts become. 

Tomorrow, Bobby is ten, and the second half of his childhood begins, and it will be radically different from the first. In ten more years he’ll barely resemble the person he is now, although some essence will still be there - the green eyes, the dry wit. I’m fascinated to see what he becomes.