My second son reminds me of me.

It’s scary sometimes, how I can watch him and know exactly what he’s thinking because I used to feel the same way.

I remember the moment I recognized this. I was returning something in H&M, he was tagging along. While I waited in line, I watched him. The floor had captured his interest. There were arrows indicating different checkout lines, with decorative circles between them.

I saw my son consider the floor carefully and then take a cautious but large step to the right, landing safely in a circle. Then he took another step into the next circle. I knew exactly what he was thinking. I knew those games too well. The games in my head, the step on a crack break your mother’s back that I took way too seriously long after it was rational for a kid my age to do so.

I taught a unit on Roald Dahl’s short stories a few years back. I showed the principal my selection. She read them, approved most, and then pointed to one of my favorite stories. “You can use this one, but I really don’t get it,” she said.

I knew then that she’d probably never get me, even if she did adore me as a teacher.

The story was about a boy who imagined that the carpet that ran from his living room to the front door was a mix of snakes and fiery rocks, and the only safe place to walk was on the black, and if his pinky toe dared touch the red or yellow, he’d die. The story then traces his journey across the floor… I won’t spoil the ending.

When I read that story I thought, Oh, you know me. And when I read the story with my class, I could tell which girls saw themselves in the story by their obvious delight in the folly of imagination. Yes, it caused us tremendous stress at times, but our imaginations were so robust and joyous.

My son — he has an imagination. Possibly more than me. I don’t recall making up the stories and adventures that he does. I may have thought up that sort of stuff, but I never shared. He tells me about the things he’s learned and the prizes he’s won and what he’s going to do, and it’s all one wonderful tall tale after another. Which is fine, really. Because he’s happy. And I’d worried about that.

He’s so similar to me, I was worried he was doomed to suffer in school like I had. I was a square peg trying to fit into a round hole, and it just didn’t work. And the boys’ system is so much more rigid than the girls’.

But he’s happy in yeshivah. He’s all of five, to be honest, but he has to sit at a desk all day. I remember deliberately falling off my chair on the first day of second grade.

Every day he comes home and tells me stories. His favorite ones are about parties. “We had a party at yeshivah!” and every day he was served something else, candy, pizza, hot dogs — all plausible in yeshivah, albeit excessive. But then he told tell me he’d had sushi. Seriously? Sushi? I don’t know how popular sushi is as a party item in pre-1A (for high school girls, now that’s another story).

But if he’s happy, and he thinks he’s having sushi parties, I’m happy too.

Then I got a phone call from his rebbi. Don’t worry, just calling to check in. Everything is fine. At the end of the call I said to the rebbi, “By the way, Chanoch has a tendency to make up stories. He tells me you have sushi parties. If there’s something that happened in yeshivah that I should know about, please understand that I may not hear about it, or know how accurate it is, so just let me know.”

“Okay,” he said. “But we did have sushi.”

“What?!”

“For the letter samech. And we’re having a salad party tomorrow for the letter sin.”

“Oh.” We finished the call. I was dumbfounded. Chanoch having sushi had become a family joke, but it had really happened. Was he the son I thought he was, or was I just projecting my own attributes on him and predicting a dismal future based on that?

(Excerpted from Family First, Issue 628)