A teen playing video games, watching TV, spoiled by his mom.
Here’s where patience comes in. Not the same patience as
When he was a baby and had that fever,
Or when he was loaded into the ambulance as a boy, with that terrible cough.
I prayed he would be okay and told God I would do anything please make him okay.
He doesn’t drive a car yet. He’s a nice boy—okay, a little spoiled—but he doesn’t worry me
The way I worried about him when he was young.
As a child he was joy itself, beaming.
Now my brown-haired boy’s a teen, with jokes and secrets.
What do I need patience for, now? Am I waiting for him to become a man?
I remember always saying to myself, Children are not yours.
You “have” them, but they belong to themselves, to everyone.
Don’t get possessive. Don’t worry too much about them. They’ll be okay.
Edgar Poe had no children. He lived when babies were lost all the time—
Let Ralph Waldo Emerson tell you about that horror;
But no, stern Ralph said little;
Perhaps the less said about it the better.
I won’t lie. I wanted my son to evince athletic skill, and when he dragged his feet
On the soccer field, it was sad to me, as when classical music
Not only bores him, it makes him sad and depressed. I would listen
To my father’s classical records with sweetness and awe. What is continuing
Here? What does he love that I love? I find Pokemon inane.
He knows his way around a computer in a way that makes me look like an idiot.
He doesn’t want to go outside with me. There’s no outdoor playground now
That interests him. I know there are things about life which I don’t know.
That I will never know. That I think I should know. Should I know them?
What are they? A cake? Candles? Happy birthday?
Here’s to now. Sweet now. And the future. The sweet future.
Happy birthday, my dearest son.
