Super Hero

"Mom, if I forget to be Batman when I grow up, will you remind me?"

My son asked me this one day as we were going about our usual routine.  "Of course I will!" I said.

Truth is, I will always try my best to remind him of his Hero status.  He's too young to know it yet, but he has saved me more times than I can recount.

When my girls were small I would sometimes try to imagine myself at the age I am now, with no little kids around and all I could feel was a kind of grief.  It's true, that from the moment they are born, we have to slowly start letting our children go although when we're going through the day-to-day motions of raising them, we sometimes feel the task is never-ending.  I remember going through the steps with my daughters, talking, walking, potty training, kindergarten--with each milestone I had to loosen my grip a tiny bit more, until finally one day my oldest announced she was getting her own apartment.  How did it all happen so fast? I wondered.  Wasn't it just a few months ago that she was 10?

Hannah and Sylia in matching dresses, 1996

Oddly enough, even though my daughters are 19 and 24, I still think of them as 6 and 10.  It was strange, when my youngest daughter suddenly shot up so tall that I would mistake her for her older sister whenever she entered a room and I wasn't looking directly at her.  Now they are both taller than me, smarter than me, and more beautiful than I could have ever hoped to be.  They are kind-hearted, goofy, artistic big dreamers, and for so many years, were my only reason for getting out of bed in the mornings, especially after the divorce.

I know that life as an adult is supposed to be multi-faceted, and mine has been.  Maybe I've even had too many irons in the fire at times as I was raising my girls.  I know I haven't been a perfect parent, but the one constant I have had in my ever-changing life has been the presence and love of and for my children.

That concept of constancy applies even more to my little boy.   My future Batman.  Since he was born my life has taken more twists and turns than I can even keep up with in my mind.  I could list the crazy things that have happened, the poor decisions I've made, the dips and dives my roller coaster has taken that were unexpected and out of my control, but I'd rather focus on the one little thing that has stayed the same:  The comfort of knowing I still have my boy depending on me.

My girls are learning more and more independence.  They make their own decisions and they deal with their own consequences, just as all adults do.  I still worry about them.  I still want to make decisions for them sometimes, but I know it is there turn to brave life, just the way I did when I was their age.  I wish I had been a better mom to them.  I wish I had been more present, more of everything they needed.  But I realize I did the best I knew how to do at the time, and I feel so blessed that they love me so much and still depend on me when they need to.  I know that when something comes along that they just can't handle, they're eventually going to call Mom.  That's something I have never been able to do--call my mom, that is, when I need support or guidance.  I'm glad I at least did a good enough job with them that they trust me.

I had no idea why at 36 God would think I needed to have a baby.  I was in a relationship I wanted out of, I was overwhelmed by life already, I had stage 3 Renal Disease.  None of this seemed like a good idea to me.  But despite one doctors emphatic suggestion that I was crazy to risk having another baby in my condition (he strongly urged abortion) and despite my child's father trying to convince me of the same,  I knew, deep in my heart that this little boy was going to be an essential part of the rest of my life.  I even knew, before the first ultra-sound that I was having a boy.  Don't ask me how I knew, I just knew.

I don't tell him that he saved me just by being born.  I don't tell him how, there are days when I'm so grateful to have him, just so I'll have a reason to wake up in the morning.  I don't want him to ever feel the pressure of knowing that I look to him for purpose in my life.  But just as my girls gave me purpose years ago, he continues to give me purpose now.  He keeps me young, keeps me thinking about things that I would probably have stopped considering long ago without him around.

He is ever-inquisitive, always wanting to know how, where and most of all, "why?"  On days when I have been unable to find anything else to laugh about, he makes me laugh.  During times when I feel no one else in the world cares whether or not I exist, I remember that he cares-and he needs me to to exist.  I am the only constant he has ever had has well, I'm the only person in his life who has ALWAYS been here.  It's the nature of life that people come and go, but for a kid, a parent shouldn't be one of those people.

He's my hero, because every day, he keeps me on my toes.  He gives me  a reason to keep fighting for my life.  He gives me purpose and he brings me joy when nothing else does.  He makes me proud, he makes me exasperated, he makes me tired.  He is strong willed and resilient--honestly, one of the strongest people I know.  Sometimes he makes me want to pull my hair out, and other times he makes my heart want to explode because I love him so much.  He keeps the memory of my little girls alive and close to my heart, even though when I look at them now, it often seems as if they were never little.  He has little pieces of them that pop up in his personality--which I guess are also little pieces of me, and that reminds me that even if I never live a life that makes a big impact on the rest of the world, I will have made a difference to at least whomever my children love and cherish as they live their lives.

I hope I'm still around to remind him, when he's getting ready for college, that he's supposed to major in Super Hero studies.  Either way though, he'll always be a Super Hero to me.