Long Hugs Before You Float Away

The world spins so fast I don’t know how we stay attached to it. I suppose we don’t after awhile. We start out with our kid toes in the dirt, but our adolescent heads reach the clouds eventually. Then you waft away like a helium balloon on a Saturday in the summer. Mom and dad watch you go. They get smaller and smaller as you go higher and higher. Then they’re gone. It all seems like slow motion when you’re young. But it’s not. Time is whiplash. It’s a dull ache at the nape of the neck. I feel it most when I’m tilting my head to the sky to watch my kids float away.

Senior year (El Salvador; August 2022)

It’s Halen’s last Christmas at home. He’ll wing away to college next fall and he’ll come back home a year from now as a visitor, on temporary loan to our lives from his own. A little dream that has the shape of what we had. A little dream you try to hold onto for as long as you can.

We watched a movie a few nights ago. Halen and Shannon shared the beanbag. The movie was about kids and Christmas and kindness. When it was over, Halen stretched out his sinewy self, wrapped his arms around his mother and pulled her close. He’s always been that way, given to holding hugs for a long time. The sweetest of impulses. I saw it in the sputtering light of the movie credits. Like something that’s almost over.

I remembered a picture from a long time ago. Shannon sits in a recliner in the wintertime, Halen on her lap. He’s sick, he’s sleeping. The camera caught one of her hands slipping lovingly through his soft toddler hair. That was a lot of years ago. 

Snuggles (Reston, Virginia; January 2007)

Now Halen is six inches longer than his mother. He seems to envelop her small frame on the beanbag. He buries his face in her shoulder. This is what time does to us. It makes some of us bigger. It makes some of us smaller. It makes all of us more beautiful if we let it. At times like these, it’s somehow possible to think in just a fraction of an instant of all the moments that passed between the sleeping toddler on his mom’s lap on the used red recliner and the young man made of muscle and mother’s love with his arms around Shannon on a big black beanbag at Christmas time. There were so many moments. There were too few moments.