A Letter To My Son On His Fifth Birthday

My son in his first clothes, the day after he was born. Also, enormous hand.

Dear one,

There is a movie that was made 30 years before you were born. It stars a white lady singer who became insanely famous after popularizing, or perhaps appropriating, the dance culture of LGBTQ people of color. In it, a nice married woman from the suburbs puts on a black leather jacket, hits her head on a lamppost and loses her memory, and is mistaken for the film version of this edgy pop star. Things, as you can imagine, unravel from there. Mobsters chase after her in search of some valuable jewelry, people suspect her of murder, she is expected to be the front woman for a very hip band and fails miserably. At one point, she is mistaken for a prostitute. Eventually, when she returns to her true identity, she realizes how unhappy she was with her good, clean life, and abandons it in pursuit of something messier and brighter.

Some days, being your mother feels like a jumbled screening of “Desperately Seeking Susan.” I am still waiting for someone to bust through the door while I comb the tangles out of your hair or cajole you into eating your vegetables or answer your questions about where people go when they die, and say “you’re not supposed to be here, lady. Now get back on the streets where you belong.” But in some ways this life is the brighter one, or at least I am paying more attention to cleaning up my messes since you’ve been around.

Your fifth year has been a hard one. But in many ways you have been very, very happy. Unlike me, you do not need much to accomplish that. I am already beginning to see that you and I are very different. Why this is surprising, I do not know.

Before you were born, while you were still “an egg,” as you like to say, I was walking down a city street with your Auntie, free of responsibility in ways I was not yet capable of understanding, discussing motherhood. A mother we knew was feeling neglected by her grown-up children. She deserved, she believed, to be considered more often by them. Your Auntie, mother already to your two sweet cousins, disagreed. “The deal,” she explained, “is that you love your children more than anything in the world. And it is just not possible for them to love you that much in return.” I agreed, in my childless hubris, that this should be known and accepted by all mothers. I knew I would not make the mistake of having such unreasonable expectations. That was foolish of me.

I remember where I was when I first realized I loved you. Or, rather, when I stopped being afraid that I might not love you in the way I was supposed to. I had just dropped you at childcare, was wandering around in the confusing state of freedom and guilt and uselessness that I still feel today, when the sweetest little dog passed by. I did not like dogs, do not like dogs, but you, one-year-old and newly wise to the world around you, were enchanted with them. One of your few words, after “dada” and “uh oh” and eventually, “mama,” was “woof.” Whenever you spotted a dog, which you could do from impossible distances, you would point your finger and shout, “woof!” When this dog passed me, I lit up immediately, reflexively, and said out loud, to no one, “woof!” I knew then that we shared a way of seeing things, that joy was something we could co-create, that I had never really missed you until that moment.

There is this thing that happens in stories about men, where the man abuses everyone he comes into contact with, until he finds the right woman to inspire him to stop being such an asshole. “You make me want to be a better man,” he tells her, in some form or another. I have always thought, why don’t you just be a better man your own damn self? Why is it this poor woman’s job to make you good? And what do the people you’ve hurt care about your too-late redemption? You will find out soon enough that I, like most women, save most of my abuses for myself. But you do, I have to admit, make me want stop them. Though I have to remind myself it is not your job, you make me want to be a better person to myself, on your behalf.

Soon you will no longer nuzzle me during the romantic parts of a Disney movie. Soon you will stop wanting to hear the story of your birth. Soon you will ask all of your questions to your friends and teachers and YouTube influencers and I will have more time to do I don’t know what.

You are probably wondering why this letter is mostly about me, when today is, after all, your day. Because I don’t think I became your mother for you, I think I did it for myself and I’m still not exactly sure why.

One thing I know about you is that you already show an incredible capacity to integrate two contrary ideas at once. The virus is bad but it has brought some good. The world is more beautiful and more terrible than it has ever been. You don’t seem to mind that I may, in fact, be suffering from a case of mistaken identity. You are five now, different than you were a year ago and six months ago, and even, impossibly, a few weeks ago. You know that identity is a fluid concept.

By many measures, my mother has given me a better life than the one she had. And she, by all accounts, had a better life than her own mother, and so on and so on back to the Dark Ages. I don’t really know what “better” means, and I think yours may be the first generation that backtracks on the accumulated wealth, education, and so-called progress of the generation before. But I hope the things that make your life difficult are of your own choosing. And I hope that it doesn’t take the mob chasing after you for you to realize what you want from your life and go ahead and find it.