Sons

Sons enter my heart at two year intervals. At opposite ends of the year. One under a night sky filled with diamonds. One into a day gone gray with fog. Their lungs strong as bellows. Their cries in the beginning as foreign to me as Korean and now, years later, they are sounds I remember the way a master ornithologist remembers birds’ songs.

The first one was longer than my arm. His knees knit as he grew inside me and his tendons shortened so that his legs came out bent and stiff and crooked as that old man in the nursery rhyme and so I pulled his legs like taffy, pulled to make him straight and perfect and whole so that he would become tall as his great grandfather’s brother, the Russian guard.

The second one was born screaming—his head covered with the deep red hair of long dead ancestors so that I must count backwards into our histories, as on a number line, and run deep into negative numbers, before I find that Incarnation’s mother’s sister back in Santander, Spain was a red-headed hussy named Ruby. Her hot Latin blood runs through this son who parries with my heart like a fencer prancing up to threaten me, then backing away. Over time I drown myself in my own pity trying to decode him. I walk into the ocean of my frustration with rocks in my pockets, his cries at my back like a fog horn calling out to me from shore.

Sons enter my heart with lentils and pea pods from their garden. The scent of soil in one dirty kiss. The slime of red efts in the webs of their fingers. Their innocence as potent as opium. I breathe it in until I almost break, then just one sniff more.

Sons enter my heart those nights ghosts appear on the floor all around my young son’s bed. They bob there in his dreams, released from the ocean of nightmares his tiny bed navigates nightly. In escaping, he says, he steps on their heads like rocks in a stream and passes to the safety of the shore that I am sleeping on, dreaming of a sunny beach in Cuba, cafe con leche, my husband whose hands melt me like butter. This son enters my bed, enters the crook of my left arm, head to my chest to hear my heartsong the way bandits set one ear to the rails to see if a train is on the way and when they know it is, they move to ambush it the way this son ambushes me—completely.

My sons go from smooth to hairy in a season. Grow a head taller than me. Push away and run circles around me that grow more and more distant. First it was around the pine tree in our yard, then a quarter mile down the road to the brook. Now it’s to Florida with a sports team or to Paris with classmates.

My sons go from speaking my language to speaking in tongues over night. They received their holy spirit, are baptized into their own generation, washed over with words and songs downloaded from the Internet. Return to me only when they’re feverish or vomiting. Look completely perplexed when their father tells them to thank me.

“What for?” they ask, not really knowing or believing there’s a need. Feeling, I imagine, that thanking me would be like thanking the sun for rising or their heart for beating or the ground for splitting each spring to spit out tulips.

Sons enter my heart on the coattails of destiny with their father’s jaw and their uncle’s frame. They are my heroes; they pave paths through the vacant lot of my soul, awakening pieces of me I had set aside. My sons enter my heart, climb deep inside me, jiggle all the stagnant parts of me and exclaim like Einstein, “We can get these working!” They connect wires from yesterday to tomorrow and shock me into existence, turn me over like an old engine and when I turn to thank them they say “What for?” not knowing or believing how dead my battery was after carrying all the sorrows of Eastern Europe all these years—my immigrant parents’ insecurities, my four sisters who gyroscoped around me like starved cats.

Sons enter my heart and nest there as a colicky infant whose cries made my heart crumble, as an impetuous two-year-old who ran too fast down hills and came up with scabbed lips, as a fifth grader who kept one lumpy thumb nestled in his soft tongued mouth, as a too young fourth grader put in to pitch with two men out and bases loaded and he pulled out the win as easily as a magician pulls a rabbit out of a hat! As a six-foot-tall teen just accepted to college. He holds me, his proud and sobbing mother, to his chest the way I held him for the first time eighteen years ago under that night sky filled with diamonds. I smiled as widely then as he is now, feeling very much the same as he is—like I hit the lottery big time. His little brother the athlete steps in and thumps my back three times to quiet me.

Sons enter my heart and set up permanent dwellings, dig cellar holes, build houses that are meant to last with firm timbers, set them together with perfect, hand hewn pegs. They leave the lights on for me now when they go out, so I remember they’ll be home again soon.