The one in the middle is the green kangaroo
Our younger son, S, has moved into his older brother’s empty bedroom. In the beginning, when I saw the sliver of light underneath the door, I had a strange sensation that the person inside the bedroom was my older son. It was a jolt to be reminded that he no longer lived with us in this house and it has been a delight to open the door to find that the person inside the room is S, our almost-sixteen-year-old, growing furiously – but in a chill way (more on how this is executed later) – into himself.
S is our green kangaroo, the peanut butter to the two slices of bread that are his older brother and younger sister. When he was only 18 months old, my mother said to me, “This one really knows his likes and dislikes!” Which I understood to be code for: this one is going to be challenging. When he was in third or fourth grade, S started to keep a list of all the things that irritated him. His goal was to reach 1000 items. Unsurprisingly, it was a period of time when most of his sentences at the dinner table started with, “You know what I don’t like?” But the flip side to that – exactly as my mother called it – is that he is sensitive to the idiosyncratic beauty that surrounds us; he is attuned to delights that others gloss over easily. Ever since he was little, S could burrow into a creative project with the focus and attention to detail of an artist in his flow state. When we played Pictionary, he would draw well beyond the limits of the hourglass timer, adding detail and context and story to the word we were supposed to guess.
This last week, my husband was traveling for work and our daughter was away at 8th grade camp, so it was just me and S at home. With three kids, we’re always in different combinations and permutations and once, we even analyzed which configuration is the most rare (at the time, I think we landed on: Dad + older brother + younger sister). That said, I can’t remember the last time – if ever! – S and I were alone for dinner at home. When I went grocery shopping earlier in the week, I stocked up on his favorites: steak and potatoes, chicken, Japanese milk bread, and marshmallows.
We were alone in the house for only two nights and both evenings, we stayed at the dining table to chat, long after the steak and chicken were eaten, and before either of us stood up to clear the plates. There was a sense that if one of us stood up, our time together – delicate like the rainbow-streaked surface of a soap bubble – would end. All three of our children are talkers, and dynamics – in any social situation, but especially in families – often convince people to play certain well-rehearsed roles. When all five of us are together, S plays the comic relief with his one-liners that are the perfect balance between cynicism and observable truth. But alone with me, he is sweet and sensitive – still honest, but in an earnest, rather than nonchalant, way. We talked about running – his newfound passion and focus for the past two years – and his philosophy about surrounding himself with simple, motivated, and good people. A week ago, he shared that for an art project, he was re-interpreting poems into drawings, so I’ve been sending him poems by email. We talked about a few of the poems and how he’d started on a drawing of Billy Collins’ poem, “Cheerios,” the last line of which reads
…a bar of sunlight illuminated my orange juice.
The next day, I asked what he had on for the weekend and he said, “I don’t make plans, Mom. Plans present themselves to me.” That’s my green kangaroo, our almost-sixteen-year-old who knows his likes and dislikes, and is furiously becoming himself, but in a chill way.