Still following

So much of being a writer is being a witness to a story in another room, another dimension, another lifetime. 

It’s late on a Monday night when I push open the door to your room, my eyes following the orange triangle of light that slides under your desk on the way in. I am not trying to surprise you. I am here to say hi. I’m here to witness. The dim blue of your laptop falls across your shoulders like a halo as you pound the keys of your piano, sending the sounds directly into your ears. 

Your hands are doing vastly different things, your right one moving like you are trying to shake out some joint stiffness. Your left one plods up and down like a hammer, playing chords I can only assume. I watch, wondering what your chord hand might look like someday with a wedding ring. Would you wear gold or silver or titanium or black rubber? Would you skip the jewelry altogether and tattoo a ring around your finger to go with the collection you have going on your arms? Will a wife or child someday stand in a doorway and watch you create kingdoms with the music that you hear and write in your head?  These are not productive thoughts. But they are my thoughts in this small moment.

Something about the way you slump over your keyboard shows me the little you of yesterday inside the big you of tonight. I backpedal 9 years into a church parking lot when you were 10, barely out of 4th grade. We were freshly moved into the house where we still live, still looking for paring knives and toilet brushes in unpacked boxes. 
Unopened mail on our counter would have revealed the name of your fifth-grade teacher—another new teacher at another new school—if we’d opened it. 
You were starting over. 
Again. 

You were unsure of yourself. You looked with suspicion at your own shadow, amorphous and shifting in a late afternoon sun. You constantly searched for my shadow and then checked to see if it came with a body, too. To you then, shadows were an absence of light, not a proof that the light existed.  You did the only thing you could at the time, which was to track 100% of the people and things within your control 100% of the time. 

This night I’m remembering in the church parking lot is the night your tiny voice rewired our family. It changed everything.  I had forgotten my Bible inside and turned back toward the building. You had begun to climb into the car. When you saw me reverse direction, you reversed direction too. 
“Where are you going?” I asked, trying not to load the question.

“With you,” you said, as if it were as natural as blinking.

“Of course you are,” I said. My voice sagged with sarcasm, frustrated that you wanted to follow me everywhere. Why would I not want you to follow me everywhere? 

You looked at me with the dark eyes I cannot see tonight as you face away from me and said, “Mama, why does Dad respect me so much more than you do?”

Ouch. Over the clicking of my heels on the asphalt I heard my heart crack like a #2 pencil. I can still hear that sound. And your voice. I will never forget either of them. This moment is a core memory that sticks in my throat.

I floundered for an answer to your question. I had to have an answer.  Possibilities rolled through my mind. Valid answers, I thought. 

Because Dad doesn’t have you following him 24/7. 
Because Dad gets to come home the hero every day after I’ve answered 1000 questions and made 100 mistakes. 

But those were not the answers to your question. 
I owed you a real answer. 

“Because Dad is a good man. A good father. I’m sorry, boy. I’m going to do better.” 

And I did. 
We both did, you and me. 
We worked it out. 
You advocated for yourself.
I was open to change. 
I never spoke to you that way again. 
I made hundreds of other mistakes as your mother. 
But I never made that one again.  

In 3 weeks, you’ll be 20.  No longer squatty with straight blonde hair, the shadow that once scared you is 6’ 2” and crowned with dark, floppy curls and your signature cone-shaped beanie. 
As I stand unseen in the quiet blue crack of your room, I am thankful to be a witness. 
There is nowhere I wouldn’t want you to follow me now. 
There is nowhere I would not follow you.