Letter to Bean: Your First Steps

Your wide hopeful eyes were big and round. “Momma, can I please have a spend the night with C! Please!”

It might be time for this.

“Hmmmm, let me talk to your father. We will discuss.”

“Okay.”

The next morning, while brushing my teeth, I heard, “Dadda, did you talk to Momma about me spending the night with C?”

Your father replied, “yes, we did talk about it. Do you want your cousins to come here or would you like to go there?”

“I want to go there!”

“Dragon, would you like sleep over with the cousins as well?”

A pause.

“No, thank you.”

“Okay, Bean, your mother and I are happy for you to spend the night.”

“Tonight?!”

“Let us discuss with C’s parents and come up with a plan. Tonight works for us.”

And that was that.

Bean, you asked me recently what your first words were - to which I have the dubious distinction of not knowing. I am sorry. If it is any consolation, I don’t remember your brother’s first words either. Neither do I have the honor of remembering the details around your first walking steps.

That being said, parenting offers myriad opportunities to record and note instances of offspring stepping into spheres beyond the home circle, beyond the input and holding and caring of the parents. That is, after all, the whole point of growing up - you are growing out and away from your home base.

I remember the first time you were able to hold and drink from the bottle by yourself. You were hungry. I was driving somewhere. You were able to manage the bottle by yourself. I felt as though I won the lottery.

To continue the food theme, I am no longer cutting up your meat for you. Now our dinner conversations revolve around whether it is easier to cut with the left or the right hand - not whether it is safe for you to use a knife.

And yes, here we are - the first spend the night. Spend the night. I don’t know when it became spend the night instead of sleepover - but I much prefer it. The phrase bounces on its hard consonants. Spend the night.

Bounce bounce bounce. Just as you bounced out of the house.

You packed your own bag of toiletries, pajamas, and fresh clothing. I braided your hair so that issue would be removed from the bedtime routine. You buzzed around.

“Is it time? When can we go? Soon?”

Later that day, you gave me a perfunctory hug goodbye, “Momma, C is waiting for me!”

“Okay, my love, I will see you in the morning.”

The screen doors shut behind your braids.

Meme taught me when I was young about the energetic cords that connect emotional relationships. She described wide luminous cables connecting us at our bellies. You shared with me years ago about the fishes that live in our bellies, visiting each other.

I think the energy cords are their highways. I think there is also more than one fish, I think it is a school of energetic fish that weave back and forth, coiling and twisting together into a double helix.

These energetic (etheric) cords between individual energy fields are oft cited when a romantic relationship ends - talking about the importance of “cutting the toxic cord”, “releasing the energetic bind”, “severing the emotional ties”.

However, I am your mother.

Perhaps one day you will experience the shattering love tsunami that engulfs and permeates one’s heart as a parent. Before you were born, I understood that parents love their children. But that intellectual understanding is a flimsy shadow of the real deal. When you were born it felt as though a door in my chest had been blasted through and suddenly I met my heart for the first time. It is irrational. It is earthquakes and lightening and explosions.

You were about 3 weeks old and I was unpacking a box of hand-me-downs from Meme. Tucked in with the ruched front cotton dresses of my childhood was my name bracelet and swaddling blanket from the hospital. I held the blanket in my arms and wept. It was not until that moment that I truly understood how much Meme and Baba loved me.

It is a love that is unexplainable, unending, and relentless. The love I feel for you is as close as I can get to grokking what the Divine feels for us.

As such, my beloved firstborn, there is no severing of this cord. Your mother’s fish will be visiting you on our etheric connection for always. Sending you love and courage and sweet dreams on this, and all future, spend the nights.