full with purpose
written to my son, in November and December of 2019
Today, as you sat at an old wooden table with me and your grandmother, you said someday, I want to have a baby in there, rubbing your belly like it was full with purpose.
Forgive us: we laughed.
Grown people aren’t accustomed to such honest admissions of aspiration, nor have we developed more nuanced responses to that which we cannot conceive. Because you, my son, cannot conceive.
Or, that’s what I assumed before sitting down to write this evening and typing “male uterine transplant,” into a search engine. I realize now just how small my imagination has become with age, and here I am only 32.
Your dreams are larger than the world wants them to be, and if I have any hopes for you beyond a mostly good and mostly peaceful life, it is that your dreams are never made to be smaller than they are – that they’ll remain large enough to follow with persistence, of which you have plenty, if that is what you choose to do.
Not long ago, your heart broken along with the toy in your hand, you quickly devised a plan to fix everything. All you would need was a bit of tape. Tape had worked well for you in other moments of distress – a paper craft gone awry; a picture you’d made falling carelessly from the wall – but I remember looking at this particular toy and thinking, “tape is not gonna fix that.” I was quick to voice this thought out loud, hoping to save you from another, seemingly unnecessary layer of disappointment. And, quite honestly, to save myself from having to watch you – and hear you – go through it all again. Saving is something parents like to think they can do, and you are always quick to remind me how unflattering a thought it is. Mostly you do this by completely ignoring my forewarning, having not asked for my opinion on the likeliness of your success in the first place.
I probably threw up my hands or shrugged my shoulders, and left you to learn the lesson on your own. And while I don’t remember the exact toy in question, merely a strong sense of its untapeability, I do remember how it felt to see you so easily and instantly prove me wrong. Holding that wholly taped-up thing in your hands, raising it up for me to see, you were full of pride with not a glint of “I told you so,” in your eyes. Only joy and the urge to share it with me. I may have felt something like shame if you hadn’t been so willing to forget it all, or maybe it wasn’t forgetting, but your capacity to ignore anything I had to say in the first place that made that moment so easy.
This still happens more often than I’d like to admit: my hoping to save you from disappointment, or a little bit of lost time, you ignoring me, proving me wrong, and never once rubbing my nose in it. You are five years old and there’s a lot of magic in that age. You haven’t yet forgotten that the well of potential and possibility from which you rose never diminishes. Choices too, never diminish, though we like to tell ourselves they do.
Knowledge of this doesn’t necessarily make the choosing any easier. For choices as seemingly simple as how should I spend the next hour I’ve still yet to crack the code. It turns out, I love too many things in this life: the knife hugging the slide of my knuckles and nails with each sticky oiled slice of garlic; the sight of their shoots coming up too soon, silly shoots; dried flowers, like the way nothing is ever the same afterwards but we ache to make it so, and the aching is a full bouquet we sit with, faint and echoing on the banquet for years; the banjo whose strings can sit just outside of tuned and still hum that twang, giving grace to fingers like these so often too busy with all the other things it turns out this life hardly has room for.
In your mind, every avocado pit is a tree we’ve not yet planted; every cardboard box – even the ones meant to live short lives wrapped around greasy burgers – has the capacity, in your hands, to become something else anew. I hope you never forget the purpose you bring to the world in simply existing. This is not something most grown-ups remember, which is why I believe we turn so often as we age to things that jog our memories: seeds tended to in a garden; cooking; music and music and music.
One of our favorite places to be together is in the branches of the magnolia tree. We don’t do this often enough, and perhaps that’s part of the magic. Late summer and fall branches are the best, most of the mosquitos having died back, the curly cones preparing their red offerings all around us.
Our hands are hungry for them and we can sit for what must be only minutes, but feels like hours, good and filling hours, slowly pulling each seed by its strange and stretchy string until it comes loose, the string transformed to a spider’s silk in the wind. The soft sound of seeds on leaf-litter, raining below us.