Ode to my Andrew

I take him aside to let him know how proud he's made me, how beautifully he played his saxophone at the concert last night, how I noticed that he always knew exactly when to come in, when to play softly,when to hold a note, and when to let it go.

And under the bright hot light of my scrutiny, he writhes. He is that uncomfortable in his own skin these days. But when I look closer, he is pleased, so pleased, to hear my words, even though they are causing him such obvious physical discomfort. He rides high on my praise for at least an hour.

These tweens are disguised to us. They are too tall for their own good. They've sprouted pimples overnight. They are rough and coarse, reflexively rude, chronically out of sorts. They are hard to like. But really very easy to love.

I will not stop complimenting my twelve-year-old son, even if he makes it harder and harder for me to want to do so. I will not stop, because he is no different from you or me in his need for, or desire for, validation. Or it may be that he requires more of it as he hurtles towards the undeniably fraught adolescent years. I will not be fooled by my child's adolescent shell. It is just armor, nothing more. I will not forget that within lies a stunning vulnerability and softness.

He is nearly as tall as me now. His feet are larger than mine. But never have I been surer that he is my baby, that he will always be my baby, even when I am eighty and he is sixty. Then I will see through his thinning hair and bulging middle to the infant I cradled and fed and loved sixty years earlier, the memory no less potent for its age.