Double Crowned

Today I want to take Ozzy somewhere, anywhere, to a place where we can throw coins into a fountain. I want to hold my breath and drive him through the rainbow tunnel, look up at the sky at the first star together even though it is only 9 am. I want to wish and have it be heard.

Someone made the observation the other day that Ozzy and I have the same hairline at the nape of the neck, both of us curving to the left. Bryan says I have a category 3 hurricane forming at the top, a category 2 on the other side. He swirls his finger around the impending storms on my head when he passes me in the kitchen. Meanwhile the lady who cuts Ozzy's hair says that if I have another baby it will be a girl, something she can tell based on his double whorled cowlicks, an old wives tale if ever there was one. Moooo, Bryan says, pretending to lick Ozzy's hair. I don't tell the lady we are probably most certainly not having another baby.

Ozzy is having trouble with friends. The boys won't play with me, he says through lips wet with being almost 4. My heart shatters into a thousand splendid pieces. I tell him to ask nicely, to play with the girls, to maybe play whatever they are playing even if it is not a game he wants to play. Play a game you don't want to play? I repeat this in my head and hate myself for saying it, for not knowing how to fix anything.

When I was in Tel Aviv I researched everything about everything, and while talking to a professor in the waiting room about the role of alemtuzumab as a monoclonal antibody directed against the CD52 antigen of lymphocytes, he asked me if I was a nurse. No, I said, wondering why he wouldn't have assumed I was a doctor.

Because this is what I do when I don't know what to do, I Googled it. All of it. What to do when your child is shy. How to help him make friends. How to hold your breath and make a wish, because who hasn't felt invisible at one time or another? I wouldn't want to know somebody like that. There is a shared feeling to being alone, a monoclonal antibody made up of cells cloned by a parent cell. Of course Google has a vast opinion on what I should do, how I should talk to Ozzy. Google even tells me that having a double whorl in your hair is called a Double Crown, a symbol of genius to some, a promise of difficult haircuts and a future of bad hair days to others. I decided not to say anything more for now. Instead I held him tightly, his body a pleasing weight against my shoulder as he leaned against me smelling of shampoo and cereal. Today he took a robot to school for sharing. 

xo,
S