Some days are more than others. Sunday was more than other days. A quiet morning with the boys. I straightened up and fussed around the house while they played more calmly than usual. I went through old costume jewelry and weeded out broken pieces and trash. I hung my clean clothes up. I did some laundry. My son built a city for his daddy. I watched the clock.
My husband got home earlier than expected, so I hustled to switch our sitter arrangements around so that he could come with me to the dance recital. I hurried to “hem” my son’s costume by cutting the pants and sleeves. We headed downtown to the big 1920’s theater (the “feedee-ator”) and I left him backstage. He shooed me away when I tried to kiss his head for good luck. My hands ached.
As each class before his danced on the big black stage, I remembered years and years of my little sister’s dance recitals. I went to a few with my husband—then my boyfriend—over a decade ago. We sat together in an upper balcony and I studied each little girl, wondering what our little girls might look like.
Then my little boy’s dance started. He’s two years younger—and a full head shorter—than the other kids in the class. He scampered right across the stage and found his spot and grinned and danced and I sat up straight with my hands against my mouth like some caricature of a mother watching a dance recital—or something terrifying. And I think I breathed only to giggle, little moments of bubbling joy.
In two minutes it was over. He exited the stage with a cartoonishly speedy gallop to the sound of applause.
As we left the auditorium to go retrieve him backstage, I stopped in a stairwell and cried. Real, hot tears. I wiped them and wiped them and carried a red rose to my son who smiled broadly and asked, “Can I fluffy it?” And then frowned at me sternly as he caressed the petals and followed with, “WAIT. This isn’t my TOY, is it?”
I laughed hard, wiped my eyes some more. I said, “We watched you, babydoll, we watched you dance.”
And even though he’d told us we better not watch him dance, we better stay outside, he grinned a happy-shy grin and didn’t complain.
Walking back to the car in the hot hot hot sun, my son skipped beside me, his green shimmery costume scattering bright neon starlight and diamonds around me and through me. I exploded, shattered, burned.
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