Alex was halfway through his second bowl of cereal when he announced that dinosaurs would make terrible firefighters because their arms were too short to reach the hose.
“That’s a serious design flaw,” I said.
“Right?” He said it with the full weight of a scientist who has been trying to get the world to listen for years. Milk dripped off his spoon and back into the bowl, and he did not notice, because he was too busy demonstrating with his own arms exactly how short a Tyrannosaurus rex would come up when reaching for a fire hose.
I laughed and leaned across the table to wipe a streak of syrup off his cheek before it migrated into his hair. He tolerated this the way he tolerated most of my maintenance of him, with a small put-upon sigh, as though being loved were a chore he was performing on my behalf.
Motherhood, I had learned in five years of it, was not made up of the grand moments they show you in the movies. There was no soft-focus montage. There was no swelling music. It was sticky counters and made-up songs and long serious conversations about dinosaurs before nine in the morning, conducted between someone who genuinely needed answers and someone who was inventing them on the spot. It was the same seven meals in rotation. It was finding a raisin in the couch cushions three weeks after you were sure all the raisins were accounted for. It was small and repetitive and, most days, it was so quietly wonderful that I could hardly stand it.
I loved our little routine. Alex in the mornings, all questions and syrup and dinosaur logic. Laundry after lunch, folded warm out of the dryer on the living room floor while some show murmured in the background. And Brandon home late from the construction site with dust in his hair and sawdust ground into the knees of his jeans and that tired half-smile he saved, it always seemed, just for the moment he came through the door and saw us. That was our life. It was not a large life. We were not wealthy and we were not going anywhere in particular. But it was ours, and it fit us the way a worn shirt fits, soft in all the right places.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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