A Letter to My Son at Eleven
My Dearest Friend,
Every so often, the calendar gives me a reason to set aside the letter I might otherwise have written. This Tuesday happens to be my son's birthday, and eleven years ago, on this day, I became his mother.
I could probably find a larger lesson in that if I tried. I could write about how quickly childhood passes, or the strange ache of watching our children grow. But I don't particularly want to do that today.
Because eleven only happens once.
And while I cannot preserve every version of my children as they grow, I can put this one into words.
So this week, I am setting aside my usual reflections and writing entirely to him.
My Dearest Bun,
Today, you are eleven.
There is something almost impossible about writing those words. Not because I cannot believe eleven years have passed—we have certainly lived enough life together to fill them—but because eleven seems to exist in this strange space between the little boy I have known and the older one beginning to emerge. You are old enough to argue your position with the absolute conviction of someone who has never once entertained the possibility that he might be wrong, old enough to want more independence and increasingly certain that you should be allowed to make your own decisions, and still young enough to ask me to sing to you when you climb into bed at night.
This, apparently, is eleven.
I know those pieces of childhood will begin disappearing eventually, probably without enough ceremony for me to recognize them as they leave. One evening will simply be the last evening you ask me to sing, and I probably won't know it at the time. That is the strange bargain of raising children: I get the extraordinary privilege of watching you become, but I cannot keep every version of you along the way.
So today, I want to remember this one.
At eleven, your mind seems almost incapable of sitting still. There is always an idea taking shape somewhere inside it, some character waiting to be created or story waiting to be told. Sometimes that becomes a Minecraft world, sometimes a drawing or comic book, and sometimes you ask to use the computer and, rather than opening a video game as I expected, sit down and begin writing an entire chapter of a book you have suddenly decided should exist.
There are several Chapter Ones and prologues scattered among our files now, beginnings to stories that may or may not ever have Chapter Twos. I don't know whether you will finish them, and honestly, I don't think that matters. I love that you begin them. I love the confidence with which an idea arrives in your mind and immediately becomes worthy of a page.
Then, of course, there are the Dungeons & Dragons characters.
You enjoy creating them so much that I have had to explain repeatedly that at some point we have to actually play the characters we already have. We cannot start an entirely new campaign every time another interesting character wanders into your imagination. This argument has not been particularly persuasive to you, because the possibility seems to be half the fun. Why settle for one character when there are dozens more you haven't imagined yet?
That instinct appears everywhere in you. You have never been content simply to enjoy a world someone else created; you want to see what else might exist inside it. Even your artwork has begun changing in that way. You have always been able to draw in ways that amaze me, particularly as someone whose artistic ability barely extends beyond a convincing stick figure, but now your drawings increasingly need stories. One picture becomes a comic. A character needs a history. An idea needs somewhere to go.
I have watched other adults discover this about you and look at me with surprise after reading something you've written—the vocabulary, the structure, the imagination behind it—and I always feel a quiet little thrill of pride because I know exactly what they have stumbled across.
I have been listening to the stories inside that mind for eleven years.
Long before you were writing them down, you were making us laugh with them. When you were very small, you once walked around a store telling people it was your birthday when it absolutely was not. When I told you to stop lying, you immediately protested, completely indignant: "I not a lion. I Simba."
You were obsessed with The Lion King then, and apparently even as a tiny child you were unwilling to let a perfectly good setup go to waste.
That quickness is still there. So is the stubbornness, although I find that particular quality slightly less charming when I am on the receiving end of it. You do not enjoy being corrected, and you can dig your heels into the ground with a level of determination that would be impressive if I weren't usually the person standing on the other side of it.
And inevitably, Beloved looks at me and laughs.
Apparently there is something deeply entertaining about watching my own personality emerge through my child's expression while I attempt to reason with him. I would like the record to show that I find this significantly less amusing than he does.
The truth is, I know exactly why you and I sometimes drive one another crazy. We can stand on opposite sides of an argument armed with precisely the same determination not to move, and I see so much of myself looking back at me that it is almost uncomfortable. But that stubbornness is tangled up with something I deeply admire in you.
You know yourself.
You have this wonderful ability to like what you like without first checking whether everyone else has agreed it is worth liking. You throw yourself into the things that interest you, whether that is Minecraft or soccer or Dungeons & Dragons or whatever fantasy world has caught your attention this week. You can be nervous and still walk into the room. You can be unsure and still try. You do not seem particularly interested in changing the things that bring you joy simply because someone else might decide they are strange or uncool.
I hope you hold on to that.
The things themselves will change. I have no idea whether the grown version of you will still play Dungeons & Dragons, draw comics, write stories, or care quite so much about soccer. Eleven-year-old passions have a way of becoming lifelong loves or disappearing so completely that someday we can barely remember why they mattered.
But I hope the enthusiasm remains. I hope you continue to find things that make you want to know more, create more, try more. I hope you always have something in your life that makes your eyes light up when you talk about it.
Most of all, I hope you never learn to be embarrassed by your own enthusiasm.
Growing up sometimes teaches us to make ourselves smaller. Somewhere along the way, people begin to worry about being too earnest, too interested, too excited, too strange. We start checking the room before deciding how much of ourselves it is safe to show, and sometimes we trade pieces of ourselves for the comfort of fitting in.
I hope you don't.
Not because I expect you to remain exactly as you are at eleven. I want you to grow and change, to encounter ideas that challenge you, people who change you, and places that make your world larger. I want you to become more fully yourself with every year that passes.
I simply hope you take care of your spark along the way.
I see another part of who you are in the way you love your sister. You are the big brother I hoped she would have, although apparently a seven-and-a-half-year age gap offers absolutely no protection against sibling bickering. You play with her, carry her around, and watch over her with an attentiveness that is both incredibly sweet and occasionally overzealous.
Sometimes your big-brother instincts become so enthusiastic that I have to remind you that I am, in fact, her mother.
Yes, I gave her that. Yes, she may have it. No, you do not need to confiscate it.
But beneath the ordinary sibling squabbles is something I hope you always know I saw clearly: she adores you, and you adore her. I hope that no matter how your relationship changes as you grow, some part of you both remembers what it felt like to belong to one another this way.
There are so many pieces of your childhood I know I will lose, as they start to blur at the edges. Sometimes I look through photographs and realize there are fewer of certain seasons than I expected, fewer pictures than there are memories in my head, and I think I understand why.
Sometimes I was simply too busy being there.
I was listening to the story. Reading the chapter. Watching you play. Answering one of the thousand questions that had occurred to you that day. Laughing with you, arguing with you, or trying to follow the very complicated explanation of whatever had captured your imagination.
I was busy being your mom.
And Bun, what an extraordinary joy that has been.
I don't mean only that I love you. Loving you was never something I had to decide. I mean that I genuinely, deeply enjoy knowing you. I enjoy talking with you and listening to the strange paths your mind takes. I enjoy watching you discover something new and knowing that I am about to learn significantly more about it than I ever intended. I enjoy your jokes and your stories and your imagination. I even, occasionally, enjoy the stubbornness—usually later, when we are no longer actively arguing about it.
You are one of the greatest joys of my life, not because you are easy or perfect, but because you are entirely, unmistakably you.
And perhaps that is what I most want to give you with this letter: proof that I saw you.
Not only the accomplishments that will someday be easier to remember, or the milestones we marked with photographs and celebrations, but the ordinary person you were becoming between them. The boy with too many D&D characters and several unfinished novels. The artist whose pictures began demanding stories of their own. The soccer player falling in love with the game. The big brother carrying his little sister through the house. The kid who could be shy and still show up. The boy who cared deeply about the things he loved and had not yet learned to apologize for it.
I don't know who you will be when you read this again someday. Maybe some of these things will make you laugh. Maybe you will barely recognize yourself in them. Maybe you will be surprised by how much of eleven-year-old you remained.
You do not owe me this version of yourself forever.
Grow. Change. Try things and abandon them. Discover something you once loved no longer fits and find something new that does. Become someone I cannot fully imagine from where I stand today.
Just don't lose yourself trying to become him.
Keep your curiosity. Keep your humor. Keep making things. Keep finding reasons to be excited. Keep enough stubbornness to know when the world is asking you to become smaller for someone else's comfort. And wherever your life takes you, I hope there is always some part of you willing to imagine that another story, another adventure, another possibility might be waiting just around the corner.
For now, though, you are eleven.
Tonight, after the birthday has been celebrated and the day has finally quieted, perhaps you will still ask me to sing to you. I hope you do. I know there will come a night when you don't, and I probably won't recognize it as the last time until long afterward.
But tonight, when the song is finished, we will say the words we have said so many nights before.
I love you.
I love you more.
I love you most.
Happy birthday, Bun.
What a joy it is to know you. What an extraordinary privilege it is to be your mom.
I love you most,
Momma
And to you, my dearest friend,
Thank you for allowing this week's letter to belong to someone else. There are seasons when our children seem to change almost while we are looking at them, leaving behind versions of themselves we were certain we would remember forever. Perhaps that is why, every once in a while, it matters to stop thinking about who they are becoming and simply pay attention to who they are right now.
This week, I am grateful the calendar gave me a reason to do exactly that.
