Parenthood requires taking many leaps of faith and relinquishing much control, not least by committing to spend the better part of the next two decades with a person you’ve never met, whose personality and qualities are entirely unknown. For someone like me, who hesitates before agreeing to take a long car ride with someone I might not have much in common with, it’s an intimidating prospect. Before both midpregnancy ultrasounds at which my babies’ sex was announced, I’ve joked that I wished the sonographer could tell me something more substantive about the fetus. Will they sleep well in cribs or need a fancy swing? Love climbing trees or recoil at the prospect of seeing a bug? Crash the family car at age sixteen? In other words, what am I in for? I envisioned all these possibilities, an entire future, coiled inside the form of my unborn child, apparent if only one knew how to ask the question.
I read somewhere that although you can’t control what your child will become, you can usually manage to raise a person you don’t mind spending time with. And it’s true that although I often marvel at our differences—especially when he wants to spend twenty minutes standing next to a leaf blower, or requests to sit on an airplane and see lots of people—my son usually makes for good company. When I ask him on a weekend morning what he wants to do today, he suggests, “Go farmers market and library. Hear music.” When he doesn't know the word for "almond," he improvises "cinnamon roll nut." He loves eating beets, sweeping the house, and reading books together in our pajamas. He has picked up new phrases in the last few months, too. “Mama resting. Mama back hurt. Help Mama up. Rub Mama back.” And, my favorite, “Nice see you, Mama.”
In the end, I suppose I must just try to follow the advice I give my son myself when he demands to see more snowplows, or more tractors, or a school bus next to a bicycle, or a lion and a monkey: “I can’t make that happen, kiddo. We just need to wait and hope.”