Birthday Letters: Seven

Dear Satchel,

Today marks your seventh ride around the sun.  You started your birthday countdown months in advance and presented me with lists and revisions of lists for party ideas, friends you wish to celebrate with, and gifts you are pining for.  This year you were greatly inspired by a video of the Holi festival in Utah.  You wanted to host your own festival of color at your birthday party...and oh what fun we had!

You note this passing of time with both joy and a pang of sadness.  You want to "keep being a kid" you say.  We reassure you that you will be a kid for a long time and it doesn't matter how old you are because you are still ever age you've ever been.

My how you've grown this year - in ways that can be seen and ways that can only be felt.  Your love of nature continues still and you have a new obsession with fishing.  You wish to be a marine biologist, you say, like Jeremy Wade.   One of the many things I admire about you is the way you decree who you are - like that time you found an animal bone in the school yard as we were walking to the car and how when you showed it to the teacher she said, "You could be an anthropologist" and you laughed and replied, "I already AM".  

You say some really profound things that move and inspire me like:

• "Mama, Earth has it's own DNA. When people, animals & plants die, their DNA goes into the earth. So Earth has the DNA of every living thing".
 

• "If you believe you can do it, you can".

And I savor the sweetness when you say things like:

• "Joy is a gift, I am the box it comes in!"
  
  
• "Mama, I don't want to go to school...I want to go to Oprah's Lifeclass"
  
  
• "It's not fair that only deers get crossing signs, no wonder the other animals get run over!"

Your reverence for all life has expanded to mythical creatures.  You are fascinated with Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster.  While you are skeptical of Bigfoot, you are convinced that Nesse is Plesiosaurus and showed me a picture in your book to back your claim. 

Yes, you are a boy who thinks big thoughts. 

One evening at bedtime, you broke down in tears because you said you pictured infinity and that you saw the earth getting smaller and smaller in space until you could no longer see it and there was nothing but stars in every direction.  You were frightened by the magnitude of your ponderings and the mystery of it all.  How did we get here?  What happens next?  Is there anyone else out there? 

I don't always know the answers, but I do know this...we're in this together.  As you grow, I grow with you - which is but one of the many gifts you have given me - my joy and the box it comes in.

Thank you for being my son.

I loved you before you were,
I love you now that you are,
and I will love you for infinity.
Mama
(posted at the time of your birth)