My son wet the bed last night.
I am an introvert and the two hours between when my husband goes to work and when the kids wake up are my source of sanity. So when my husband walked out the door only to have my son pop his head out of bed, I began to panic immediately. There goes my writing time. There goes my quiet time.
Together we stripped his bed and found him something to wear. He had been sleeping in a sleeping bag under his cover, and he explained to me that he got tangled up while he was trying to get out of bed and fell asleep. It does’n’t matter. This particular child is of an age where he’d be embarrassed if anyone heard he was still occasionally wetting, and he usually has a reason. The reason isn’t important. The episodes are fewer and farther between. He’s getting older. It’s a minor inconvenience.
He’s a wonderful child.
He also really likes to talk. He’s one of those thinking out loud kind of kids. A lot of our conversations start with “So, Mom,”and involve hypothetical “Would you rather”s or “What would happen if”s. I devote as much of my brainpower as I am able to engaging with these conversations instead of shutting him down. Sometimes you have to ask him to stop – like in the movie theatre. But sometimes I just let him talk.
Today, when I felt so angry at him I stripped his bed and hiked down to the basement to run the laundry. Then I climbed back up to the kitchen and I thought, when loving is hard, love harder. I pulled out a pan and made him a bowl of scrambled eggs. I added cheese and ham and sour cream. Then I made butter-and-jelly toast for my little boy. I thought about how his birth had been totally unprepared for. His father had only wanted two children. He was angry when I told him I was pregnant again – though not for very long. I thought about how the boy’s great-grandmother said “Don’t expect me to say congratulations.” Three, she thought, was just too many. She wasn’t wrong. We were too poor, too crowded, too disorganized for another child. But I wanted him. I wanted him with all my heart. And when he came, our life was immediately better. He burst into our life like a ray of sunshine. He spent his first two years of life just endlessly making us laugh. And there’s never been a day I wasn’t glad to have him.
This is the kid who plays Magic with me. The kid who wants to debate with me whether reincarnation might be a real thing. The kid who, when you give him eight pieces of candy, he gives two to each of his three siblings, because he wants all things to be fair. When he was little, if he was being bullied by one of the big kids, if I started to yell at them, he would intercede and defend them with something like “well, I was being pretty annoying, Mom.”
When I took him breakfast, he was thankful and smiled at me. Then he talked to me about things he wanted to buy with his Christmas money, about who would win in a battle between vampires and Frankenstein, and about games he wanted to play. I got angrier at him when he needed more help less than a hour later, but I kept it to myself. He doesn’t need my anger and I do need his light. I didn’t get to write any fiction this morning, and soon the rest of the family will be awake and they will need me. But I made a good morning out of a bad morning and for now that will have to be enough.
And you want to know the best part of this story? After I settled down to write, my mother brought me a plate of eggs and bacon, just because. That’s how sweet life is, sometimes.
