Minkgirl Muses

My son's heart is broken today. I heard it split and fray like a guitar-string late last night, as he came wailing down the hall wracked with the imagined terrors of a dream. He was crying too hard to tell me what he saw, but he begged me to come back to his room with him, and it took him a long time to settle down. I spent the better part of an hour snoozing on the floor next to his bed (something my body is ill-suited for these days), with his hand resting on my belly (his fetishistic security blanket). When I finally left him, he was sleeping face down in a baby-style crouch with his butt in the air, breathing hard.

This morning on the way to school he told me that he dreamed that he and Lady O went to the zoo, and that they were sooo excited to be there. Lady O is his best friend and first crush - who moved to Boston a few days ago. The two became buddies at their preschool, and even though she is nearly a year older than he is, they really hit it off. Their match was based on the fact that she's an active tom-girl and he's a verbal and expressive boy. So it worked. She kind of bossed him around and he loved it. Their relationship gave me a pleasant preview of the kind of strong and assured women who I think will capture his heart in the future. It also showed me just how deep and fierce Gman's passions run. In a conversation a few weeks ago, when we were discussing our favorite things, I told Gman he was my favorite person. He replied with "O is my favorite person. I like her soooo much. I wish she could play at my house everyday."

And she pretty much did play with him everyday, because I picked her up from school about 3 days a week, since her mom needed coverage for some part-time work. And we frequently went on outings together on days off. In the week before Lady O moved, I think they saw each other 8 out of 10 days. So it was quite a shift - a rending - when they separated. And even though Gman has already weathered separation from a number of people he loved - he said goodbye to another best friend M back in SF last winter, his grandmother this summer, and various aunts and uncles and other beloveds appear and disappear in his life regularly - even though he understands where she has gone and that he will no longer see her everyday, he still craves her like a drug. And I cannot tell him how long that pain will last - who can know? And even if I could, he doesn't understand time yet anyway - tomorrow is as mysterious to him as last week or next year. He lives in the eternal present. And in today's present he has lost something very very precious to him.

I wish there was something that I could do to ease his pain. I can help him write her a post-card, broker an occasional awkward phone conversation, and remind him that she still loves him even though she is far away. But I know these measures are small, too hopelessly small to contain or soothe the flood of feeling he is experiencing, but which he has no words for. And of course, one of the strangest feature of this whole situation is the fact that most likely Gman will not remember Lady O at all when he's an older child. In fact, most of the blessed little life he has lived to this point will fade into oblivion as he grows up, because the part of his brain that stores memory is still developing. At best, he might have a handful of mental snapshots of his life here in London, enhanced by our actual photos and stories, but he probably won't really remember it as something that happened to him, it will be more like a movie he saw once.

I know time is the only cure here. In a few weeks, her image will fade in his mind and other friends or activities will claim his attention. He will survive this experience and learn from it more about how life works. But that's a little sad for me too - because life is full of hardships and suffering, and I would like to keep the wool pulled over his eyes about that score a little longer. I was looking at his little body the other day and marveling over the fact that he already has an inner life - an internal landscape that I have no control over - one in which he relives and processes what he sees and experiences around him. And sometimes the landscape is ugly and scary and painful. Sometimes it causes him to wake up screaming. And all I can do is stroke him in the dark, whisper soothing nothings, and hope that in the morning that joyful light will be burning brightly again in his eyes.

Be well.