Nathan Wavery

So I drove through farmland and one wavy road, like we were in Nebraska and then winding down to the sea and there I left the little boy who has been with me for 18 perfect years.

Except for when he was 7 and for one whole year I thought he was he most annoying person who ever lived.

But back to the real boy.

He was in my stomach about to bust out and I would swim in the lake with the bikini top, the big round belly, and bikini bottom and the dog, Jed. There were alligators in the lake, it was Florida, it was August, and I always wondered if the alligator would eat the old dog or the pregnant chick first.

Then the hospital and some AD from the crew's pick up truck got us there, it had been the middle of the night and I had mild contractions, so I walked around and ate a red popsicle, and then when they were like 5 minutes apart I said hey. Hey let's go I think the incubus in here wants to get out. (I didn't say that.)

So then I walked the white walled halls and I waited and in that big room there came the little person who stopped my one whole singular life and started one whole new expanded version life. I disappeared, joyfully, into that new, kind, tiny person. The way anyone should who wants to come out, 18 years later, with a Nathan.

We took that baby everywhere. If I was doing it, Nathan was doing it. We got no sleep, except together, in bursts, and all there was was nursing and Nathan. For nine whole months. Then a little Emma was starting up in my stomach, and then I was sick and then Nathan was 18 months and then Emma was on the scene, as serene as the boy before her. So then everywhere that Nathan and I went, Emma went too.

We didn't get very far. We mostly just made food, took naps, took walks. I basked in the children like a spa. Not like The Sound of Music, like a spa where I did all the maintenance. But the music was in the aftermath.

Then Lilly was born in the middle of elementary school, and the kids in that middle time where they're still tiny but they're running with friends and learning how to stand in lines and everything is sober and serious and farts are everything and Christmas is everything, and reading at night in bed is everything, and baths are everything and believing is everything.

Now here we are and Nathan can drive and Nathan lifts heavy stuff for me and Nathan says "let me get that Mom," and Nathan is this strong, secure force in our wavery life. He's smart and not worried, and good to people, and gentle, and mischievous, and loud and quiet. When I look at him, I feel the ocean move through me. We're friends with the ocean, the ocean is our people. He is bigger than that, all that vast. He fills us up.

I made his bed at home which is never made when he's here. He got the send off, pizza, grandparents, sheets, soap, we invaded his dorm room, he didn't talk much but he walked with us, he showed us all pieces of his tiny campus, his postage stamp of school in the middle of the farm land. Maybe it will be too small a school for him. But maybe he will pick up his shovel and play happily like he always has.

Mostly I left the little boy there because he is made for the world. We sifted him together with sand and every day driving him where he needed to go and talking to him when he was hurt or lost. We built the best person we could with our fragmented, limited selves. We tried not to get in the way of who he wanted to try being. We kept his stomach full and made him laugh and made him look at other people as places to learn stuff from, and listen to, and think about. I don't think if you knew Nathan you would ever want him to be anywhere but right over there, on his phone, at night, right nearby over there, the sound and pulse of him, at the end of the day.

He's only an hour away. He'll be home on Thursday.

I'm just saying, we pushed him off on his trike and he's running, and that wind he makes, just breathe it in, he's so beautiful.