5

It's the only time you slow down long enough for me to hold you really, when you go to bed and we do a night--night song, how I tickle your back so buttery it slices me into pieces. (For the longest time it was Powder Blue every night. You knew the words by heart and would sing with me as we lay together face to face, go to sleep my baby, sleep now little you...)

You are 5 now, a number that signifies, among other things, that I will no longer wipe your butt. This is the deal we had, and you are solemn about deals, how you shrug your shoulders and cock your head as if to say, it is done, yes? Yes. I hope I remember this, how you like to do pretend homework each night, pretend only because no one has assigned it but you. Kite does not start with C, you say, with that same shrug, because it, too is done, so you do not circle kite with your crayon.

Every day you play with ok. Is this? What about this? And because I am tired and you are always moving the answer is mostly no. No, that is not ok, how I absentmindedly say no and then catch myself sometimes. I mean yes, yes of course you can [insert totally acceptable something here]. But you cannot climb to the top of the batting cage and we cannot go to the zoo and you cannot eat a fourth cookie while running with a sharp colored pencil and a glass full of watered down grape juice. I watch my words from a long way off, from 10 years off, 15 maybe, and I cannot breathe because you fill everything, spill over, and so I tell the world to slow down. Stop. Breathe. We are just going to bed and we just have this night, what song do you want? Lately it has been Beautiful Boy, the Ben Harper version. Still, we lay face to face and sing it together, Close your eyes, have no fear, the monster's gone, he's on the run and your daddy's here. Only I say mommy, and when you look at me funny because that is not how it goes I shrug my shoulders as if to say it is done, yes? You're my beautiful beautiful beautiful beautiful boy...

Happy birthday, sweet Oz. My wish for you is that for the rest of your life, whenever you need it, you can pull up this memory of me singing this song to you and tickling your back, our faces just inches away.

Love,
Mommy

Fun Fact

I have a Geographic Tongue. Which I didn't know about until quite recently when my dentist mentioned it offhandedly as she was cleaning my teeth. "Has anyone ever told you that you have a Geographic Tongue?" Which made me feel slutty with the light shining down into my mouth like that, my tongue apparently one that gets around.

(I guess I always thought the patches on my tongue were an indication of an extremely rare oral cancer that was going to kill me, one of those things that I keep silent about because it is all eventual anyway, how I am ashamed of my own embarrassing mortality. As it turns out, my tongue is not going to kill me. It is just a harmless condition of unknown origin that affects 1% to 3% of the population, patches on my tongue that change shape like a map of political unrest.)

At my new job there are screens at the elevator banks with a running slideshow of employees: a photo, title, plus a fun fact. Wendy in Marketing bartends on the weekends! Shauna likes to hang out with her dogs. Deborah is a karaoke nut. Mike in IT has died twice!

I very much want to hang out with Mike.

Thinking of a fun fact about yourself is kind of like when it's your birthday and people ask you what you want. I don't know. A gift certificate for a massage? I prefer sweet over salty. I love me some Real Housewives. I have met Sting. Once I swallowed a weeble wobble whole. What is a fun fact about myself? The perfect balance between telling and benign, something that says now this coworker is a real hoot, but not so interesting as to suck the energy out of a room. Once I thought I had MS for 15 years but they said it was all in my head because my step-dad (no blood relation!) had MS, then he died a terrible death right after my mom died her own terrible death and not two months later I was diagnosed with MS. But wait! There's more! I researched a cure and went to Israel to have a stem cell transplant to kill my immune system and now I hopefully, probably, most certainly don't have MS anymore. 
Hi Mike in IT!

Or maybe I just like bananas a whole lot, insalate caprese, when I was born I was named Amanda but my parents changed it when they realized people would call me and my brother Andy and Mandy; I have one vaguely lazy eye. 

My tongue is a map constantly changing.

xo,
S