Dear Jasper,
Tomorrow you’ll be a whopping eight months old. How the honkin’ what?
Yesterday, we returned from our five week East Coast jaunt (of which you were a natural, no surprise there). We spent time in the Berkshires where you learned how to do clutch things like navigate a rotary (from the backseat) and consume copious amounts of (secondhand) ice cream. For the last week of the trip, we fetched your Dad from the airport and headed to Cape Cod with about eighty people to whom we were related and perhaps even gypsy children they picked up along the way.
There’s no other explanation for the body count.
Regardless, you loved the beach. Salty waves, dozens of warm arms to cuddle you, and a potentially unwise amount of new foods. (Side note- you really like meat!)
During this past month, you popped your first tooth. Hiked up both knees for a seriously real crawl. (Haven’t yet stopped.) And mastered the art of saying goodnight to loved ones on FaceTime.
And since you’re such a man, I think you’re ready for another truth bomb: I haven’t always been a Mommish person of indeterminate thirty-something age. Honestly. Back in the day, I was a little girl standing by the same harbor where your sisters just spent hours playing. And since I’ve spent the months since your birth sending you notes and emails and blogged updates on what I love about you as well as what I need you to know, I found myself wondering what I’d tell that nine year-old Me (since this summer marks the 25th year of my love affair with that very beach)…and here’s what I came up with.
Nine Year-Old Keely: Seashell collections are awesome. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. That bag of seashells you plan on taking back to Pittsfield with you is probably full of the best ones anyone’s ever seen, let alone attempted to intersperse with troll dolls on a bookshelf.
Nine Year-Old Keely: You will make the world a nicer (or at least more earnest) place with that rhyming poetry penned while listening to Richard Marx and PM Dawn on your Walkman.
Nine Year-Old Keely: Don’t worry so much about whether or not you’ll grow into your ears and nose and teeth- in roughly fifteen years you’ll meet a boy who thinks you’re everything he ever wrote into his book of rhyming poetry. (Besides, symmetrical noses are bland.)
I’m not going to tell her about how sick her Dad will get.
I won’t say how hard it’ll be each time she’ll have to leave her family and drive back across Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois to her home in Chicago, a place which exists only in her brain as one of those weirdly shaped puzzle pieces on her U.S. States map.
And she’ll never hear from me that Quantum Leap will be cancelled in a few short years.
Because Jasper, everyone deserves to have a sacred space- both in a span of acreage and years- that they can revisit to feel whole. Safe. Like the best versions of themselves in a place that doesn’t believe in time.
I want that for you, kid. I hope that you find a soul spot where, as you age (as you so ridiculously seem bent on doing), you can go to Carolina in your mind.
I hope I get to come play there, too.
Love,
Mom
Speak Your Mind