And how dare I presume to be a worthy substitute? Nothing like the rejection of a 3-year-old to make you feel really small. It mattered not that I, the mother, the one who had spent 30 hours in mind-altering labor, was readily available for fun and games, a romp in the pool. Every time my husband wanted to head out to go bodysurfing or for a swim in the pool he'd have to sneak out of our hotel room or frantic screaming would ensue. We'd driven down from Los Angeles to relax, have a good time, which only goes to show you how delusional as parents we still were. I remember in particular one long, miserable weekend in Solana Beach. My husband would do something fairly nonthreatening - leave the room, say - and our child would go insane, flinging his skinny toddler self on the floor, or worse, hurling himself after my husband out the door. Fervor extended to everything he did.įor a time when he was 2 and 3, he was obsessed with his father. He was, as the books charitably call it, a "spirited child" - which is to say volatile and active and completely unlike my friends' babies. That my son was intense didn't help matters. I'd be taking a shower and suddenly the curtain would be flung aside by a pint-sized blond in Ninja Turtle briefs. I'd go to hug him and he'd burrow his little head into my breasts, lingering there a minute too long. I'd go to sit down on the couch or a chair and he'd slide his hand under me, grinning madly. This intent pining for me began, normally enough, when he was 4. What guy ever said that to me with such purity of motive and heart? "You're the most beautiful woman in the world." The scary thing was he meant it. My son was staring up at me, his huge gray eyes full of longing, his heart banging furiously in his little bony chest. It was so quiet and small, so unlike my son's normal full-throttle roar, I almost didn't hear it. "You look like hell," I said to the mirror. My hair was piled loosely on my head, mascara ringed my eyes from the night before. A few mornings ago I was standing in the bathroom, looking like a mean raccoon. What I was not prepared for, what caught me totally off-guard, was my son's romantic feelings for me.
A preference for toys with an excess of body parts and names like "venom."
Clothes left in a heap on the floor as if the Wicked Witch had just waved her broom and made the person in them disappear. In some ways this made it easy for me when my son came along, red-faced and furious and eager to devour the world. I grew up in a house of rowdy boys, boys with no-nonsense masculine names like Jack and Tom and Jim. More importantly, I can tick off the names of the Los Angeles Lakers, play a tough game of Junior Monopoly and have a high tolerance for jokes that revolve around the letter "p." What 7-year-old boy wouldn't adore me? After all, I have nice green eyes and Jennifer Aniston-type hair, though regrettably not her long-stemmed legs.
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