| Family Tempo |

He Makes Me Scream

By Rachael Lavon | September 2, 2015

And then I scream. Because he makes me scream!

He, with the round blue eyes, glassy windows into a kaleidoscope brain that spins faster than the planet on which he walks. On which he runs. Jumps, cartwheels across, headstands upon, bulldozes through.

He, who finds the earth beneath pressed palms even more beautiful upside down than right side up.

He, who roars awake with the sun and lives each moment with vigor that reverberates off every corner of my life. I feel his echo even when he sleeps, as the walls sigh in relief and shed his footprints, their cool concrete no match for his toes.

He, who fills every space I make for him.

He, who runs his fingers, already rough like those of a man, upon every object they manage to find.

He, who is five and happiness and stress and tendons and blood and mind and strength.

He makes me scream.

Because he is a tiny, dancing, spinning madman. And when I scream, he throws his blond head backward and laughs uncontrollably to hide his pain and I seethe and tremble and wonder if I will ever understand this wild, beautiful child or if he will always remain a being I cannot reach. A stunning, wondrous mystery.

When he’s at last exhausted, I lasso him with all the words I’ve been told to use and herd him into bed. I want to creep away on tiptoes lest my presence revive his senses. But I force myself to stay.

I tell him how much I love him. I spread my arms wide.

“More than this. More than all the universe,” I say. He smiles. He understands this love that has no limits. He’s never known limits.

His long lashes flutter shut and I exhale. For the next 11 hours he is not in danger of harming himself or those around him. I pull the covers around him and I kiss his sunshine cheeks and watch his little body rise and fall peacefully.

In the stillness of night, I finally see him. A child whose potential stretches from here to the heavens. A tiny Picasso whom I beg, plead, and bribe every day to just do the color-by-number. Because if he does the color-by-number, the end result will be perfect. Perfect, perfect , perfect. I love perfect. And he knows that if he’s given a blank canvas he can create a masterpiece far more beautiful. So he crumples the color-by-number and throws it on the floor. And then I scream. Because he makes me scream!

He makes me scream because the shapes he creates have no names within the confines of my world. He makes me scream because in his universe, lines are not straight and circles can be squares and nothing is finite at all.

But here, enveloped in quiet, I see him. And I see me. And I see the screaming. And I see everything I’m doing wrong.

But I cannot change. And at five, he cannot change. Therefore, nothing can be changed.

He takes a carton of milk from the table, an unopened carton of milk. I walk into the room and wonder where it is. I look around and suddenly spy a mysterious pool of white, growing wider and wider beneath my two-week-old couch. He has flattened the carton beneath his dancing feet. The couch has been soaked through. Internally, externally. Milk. Is. Everywhere. Oh, how he makes me scream.

He empties his wooden closet shelves, dislodges them and carries them out to the growing pile at the side of my house, reserved for our Lag B’omer bonfire. He wets thousands of tissues, clenches them into balls, and hurls them at my ceiling until it is covered in multicolored tissue mess. He unearths some old house paint and paints my bathroom mirror. He makes me scream!

At some point I start to cough. I give birth to a delicious baby girl, but I am still coughing. At some point the coughing hurts, but I am a busy new mommy and a busy old mommy and of course, there is him. So I brush away my terrible cough. And then one day she coughs. Tiny pink bundle of perfection, tiny little cough. Tiny little cough turns into a scary cough. Scary cough turns into heart-thumping, mind-numbing fear as we race to the ER where we are both diagnosed with pertussis. Annoying for me. Life-threatening for her.

We spend two full weeks in isolation. Most of the time we are silent, as she is only four weeks old and not much of a conversationalist. And at last we go home, still coughing, but on the mend. Except I cannot do three things.

I cannot laugh.

I cannot sing.

I cannot yell.

Physically, I cannot. When I try, I end up choking and coughing, gagging so hard my face turns red and I gasp and gasp for air until I nearly faint. It is a painful, terrifying experience.

So I avoid my very funny husband and his brilliant sense of humor. I talk to my newborn instead of singing to her.

And I don’t yell. I don’t scream. I find other ways to tell him to stop. I walk closer. I work on my fierce look. I let more things go. I learn to be creative. For three months I never, ever scream.

And that’s when I realize that he never made me scream. I made me scream.

For every man that ever reached the stratosphere, there was a little boy who asked his parents to help him touch the stars. Maybe he didn’t ask with words. Maybe he just climbed onto the roof and stretched his fingers and stood on tiptoes and reached.

And maybe his mother almost fainted when she found her tiny son balancing precariously on her roof. But maybe she didn’t scream, the way I would. Maybe she climbs up on shaky mommy legs and breathlessly sits down next to him.

Maybe he says to her with a pout, “I can’t reach the stars.”

And maybe she encircles his little frame and breathes in his soapy hair and murmurs softly in his ear, “You can reach the stars. Let me help you.” And over and over and over she whispers, “You can reach the stars. You can reach the stars.”

Even when he fails math. Even when his reading is slow. Even with all the evens in the world. When he turns 6 and when he turns 16 and when he turns 26, she whispers to him.

Until he hears the whispers inside himself.

Until one day he orbits the earth.

(Originally featured in Family First, Issue 457)

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