When He’s Here
They come home from college. Then they go back.
As I write this, they’re still sleeping upstairs. All three of them. The eleven-year old, his seventeen-year-old sister and the twenty-year-old, home from college for Christmas. This afternoon I will drive the oldest to SFO, for his cross-country flight back to New York. But for now they are all above me, sleeping, oblivious to how much solace I glean from their act of synchronized sleeping. They are all here, breathing softly, safe, and I get to putter below, making tea and being their mother.
And mothering. When the oldest comes home from college, I mother him. He has not been home since August, and there is much mothering to catch up on! I fill the refrigerator with orange juice and eggnog and bake his favorite chocolate almond biscotti. When he wakes up and lumbers through the hallway late in the morning, I meet him in the kitchen, wanting to feed him. I take him to expensive pour-over coffee bars and cheap taquerías. He misses California Mexican food more than almost anything; you can’t get a decent burrito in New York City, certainly not a super with guacamole for $5.95. I lecture him on the disadvantages of eating every meal out like a New Yorker and beg him to buy frozen fruit and make smoothies. He promises that he will, but not with the added handful of spinach that I recommend. I buy him Kleenex; I take him for a haircut; I knit him fingerless gloves. I tether loose buttons on the wool pea coat we bought for his first New York winter, two years ago. Although at twenty he’s technically an adult, I drive him to the doctor’s appointment I have made for him and pay for his acne medication because unaffordable prescription expenses and acne are proof that one doesn’t entirely become an adult with the passing of a particular birthday.
I watch him chase his little brother through the house, wrestling him to the ground and pretending to pummel him, as he’s done since the youngest could barely walk. I watch the two slouch side by side on the green couch in the office, playing Batman on the Wii, with matching haircuts and matching concentration, despite the nearly ten years between them. I watch him treat his sister like a little sister, although she is seventeen, questioning what she wants to study in college and the music she listens to. When he likes a song she plays from her phone in the car, by a band he has never heard before, she beams. He makes us wait to play “Up On the Housetop” by the Jackson 5 until we are almost at the grandparents’ house in the car on Christmas Eve, because for years he has declared it the best Christmas song ever. It starts, he tells me to turn it up, and we all rock out. I turn and see the three lined up in the backseat, bouncing, and it’s as good as having them all sleeping at once upstairs.
I go see Quentin Tarantino’s new film with him and his dad, slightly terrified at the notion, and cover my eyes during the violent scenes. This being a Tarantino film, my eyes are covered often; still, I want to see it on a big screen with him beside me, because he is a film student and Tarantino is one of his heroes. Later we talk about tracking shots and color correction and the spaghetti western tradition. When he talks filmmaking he speaks with the speed and authority and charisma of a Tarantino character. I’m captivated and I don’t have to cover my eyes.
He leaves his dried eggnog cups beside the computer and his shoes and socks sprawled on the floor. Like he always did, like his brother does. One afternoon I find their matching Adidas Sambas splayed beside the coffee table a few feet apart, like an art piece, like a premonition. One day the smaller set will grow to the size of the larger, and will find their place beside the coffee table only during summer breaks and Christmas vacations. I know this is true but still I don’t believe it.
The first year he came back for the full six weeks of winter break and the entire summer. The second year we got him for three weeks of winter, ten days of summer. We had to cajole to get him home for another ten this Christmas. He’s a budding cinematographer and he has work to get back to: a web series he’s shooting on Friday; a pizza commercial; a music video; his junior production project. We homeschooled from his youngest days, hoping he would learn about himself as much as he learned about everything else. Hearing about his work and his fervor for it tells me we did something right. It makes it easier to endure him being so far away.
Still. When he’s at school we text, we talk on the phone, we see his face on FaceTime, each format a bit better than the last in terms of connection. Yet it isn’t like having him here, filling the fifth space at the table, lingering over dinner (handmade fettuccini with beef ragu because it’s his favorite), lighting the leaves of the advent wreath on fire over my objections and laughing at his brother’s twisted notions about clones. The texts, the calls, the FaceTimes do not linger; the back-and-forth gets snagged in the technology; the laughter gets delayed so it isn’t quite shared. And, of course, he is out of our reach. He never really liked hugs after he turned seven or so. I steal them now when he is home and mostly he indulges me. I rub his back until he twitches; I brush his hair from his eyes if I can get away with it. Once he was a baby who cried for my touch. Now I can commiserate.
His sister will be off to college in a year and a half, and just as I don’t believe the smaller Sambas will get larger, I can’t imagine that she will go. I can’t believe that her older brother will come home for shorter and shorter visits, that one year he won’t fly in until Christmas Eve, that one Christmas he may find himself filming at some far-flung location and won’t come home at all. He doesn’t really live here anymore, but I deny that too. Tomorrow morning he’ll wake up in New York and his bed upstairs will be empty. I will walk by his room with a pile of folded laundry and I will cry. But I can’t say that he doesn’t live here anymore. My heart tells me otherwise.
Originally published at Rhythm of the Home on January 3, 2013.
