Memory

This exchange with my son has stuck since before the last entry, when he wanted me to share his paper airplane skills. Prior to that weekend, we were in our home; he was going through a 'jewelry box', and the subject of old boyfriends came up when I told him what might have been in the box that wasn't anymore.

He asked why I didn't stay with someone who I thought I would be with 'forever', before I'd met his father. I said 'If I'd stayed with that person, I'd not have had you.', partially in an effort to avoid telling any more. What he said next left me silent, as I looked at him just as he was looking back at me. 'You might have had me anyway.' had just come out with little or no hesitation.

It's the deepest thing I recall his ever having said, and there have been plenty. It was if he was coming from another consciousness, direct and certain. Had it been someone else, he was saying perhaps that the gift that he is and always has been would have come into existence no matter what. The same spirit. The same soul. The same incredibly special boy would have come into being as who he is, my son, only a different way.

'You know,' I muttered to him when I could speak again. 'you just might be right about that.' He looked back at me in the same way as the moment before: something that reflected or I had noticed maybe for the first time, something deep within that was separate from just a little boy in a human experience talking to his mom. We were almost completely across the room from each other, though his eyes were both penetrating and infinitely wise, for lack of a better description, as if we were face to face, suspended in time. I hesitate to say or describe where his words came from, only that in a way I knew he was right. It was a transforming moment that was unforgettable, and if it were possible to have regrets on what we were discussing, they may have crept in then and there. It was in part an awakening, and it was shared, over as quickly as it began, yet unchangeable.