A Love Letter to My Son

Ode to the Graduate

To my darling son,

I cannot believe this day has come. Last week, you graduated from high school.

Of my children, you are the most and the least like me. The most, because we are academically alike: fast learners, curious, and prone to arguing. The least because, unlike me, you are chill. And very funny.

Your easygoing nature manifested itself at birth, when you took forever to emerge and then revealed yourself to be so calm that your father tried to have you evaluated as special needs. Part of this was a reaction to your older sister, who had been so bossy and colicky neither of us could believe babies existed who could be transported along on errands without shrieking the entire time. And you were a world-class sleeper!

You rarely cried. When you were a tiny baby, I’d pat your back after feeding you and you’d reach one of your little hands around to pat my back too. You often smiled in your sleep. You often smiled when you were awake. Though you were almost never upset about anything, you could get very enthusiastic. Whenever you saw anything that interested you—mainly balls, trucks and vacuum cleaners—you’d wiggle your whole body and kick, trying to flop your way over to whatever it was that caught your attention.

You had the sweetest face.

You were a beautiful toddler, with hair so blond it was neon. Random people would approach us in the grocery store to helpfully announce that your face and hair and eyelashes were wasted on a boy.

You got a little older and acquired some words. One of your first words, after Mama and Dada, was wow. You’d wake up at some ungodly early hour and unleash a barrage of excited hoots until I blearily stumbled in to get you. I’d pick you up and you’d say, “Wow, wow, wow,” pointing at the dog or the vacuum cleaner or various toys with wheels. I’d try to put you in bed with me and your dad, but you’d just twitch around energetically, yelling “Wow!” until we got up.

You were fascinated by your big sister, but also recognized the danger she posed. Whenever she’d come at you with a determined look on her face—wanting to dress you up or mess with your hair or whatever—you’d pivot and crawl at a blistering pace in the other direction.

You got a lot of love from her.

When you were four, a baby sister came along. She diluted some of your big sister’s attention, so you could go back to your trucks and balls and diggers in peace, but you did—and still do—adore your little sister. After we cleared up a miscommunication about whether or not you’d be responsible for feeding her in the middle of the night, you were receptive to the idea of this tiny person in our midst. You appointed yourself as her protector and constructed little forts to shield her. You’d haul her in and put her on a soft blanket, where, helpless, she’d giggle as you made vroom-y sounds and drove your little toy cars all over her.

As she’s gotten older, you’ve patiently helped her with math homework, given her advice, and driven her around. I love watching her face light up when you compliment her; she cares so much about what you think. In the time-honored fashion of older brothers everywhere, you’ve also come up with creative but insulting nicknames for her and passed on important life skills such as Xbox mastery, evading chores, and wrestling.

Like all teenaged individuals with a Y chromosome, ninety percent of your brainpower is consumed by concern about what you’ll be getting for dinner.

Also like many boys, you were also unable to pose normally for photographs for at least a solid decade. You recovered from that—sort of—but now mostly refuse to be photographed at all, even when begged by your mother. But you redeem yourself in other ways.

One thing I love about you: you make me feel like a good mother. You are not by nature sentimental—at all—but you seem to recognize that I am. Now that the clock is ticking on our time together, you have become ever more gracious toward me. Over the last few months, you’ve hugged me every day when you get home from school, even when you are clearly in a hurry to get somewhere else. You assist me with our ridiculously complicated TV remote, occasionally without even mocking me. Sometimes, you’ll even snuggle with me on the couch to watch a movie or discuss an interesting book (and obviously there is nothing you could do that would make me happier than this!) Even though you are basically a full-grown man now, you still allow me to reach up and kiss your cheek goodnight.

It’s such a cliche, but sometimes when you are asleep, I look at your face and mentally count down the weeks left until you leave, wondering how this tall stranger with facial stubble replaced my baby son.

Since you were little, every year on Mother’s Day and my birthday, you’ve handwritten me a card. They’re always the same format: three or four paragraphs of scribbly pencil on a piece of paper you took out of the printer one minute after you realized it was my special day and two minutes before you gave me your “gift.” And yet, I treasure these notes more than all my other possessions. Here’s a sampling of opening sentences from a few different years:

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Dear Mom,

I appreciate you. If it weren't for you, our mornings would be terrible.

Dear Mom,

You do so much for our family. Without you we would all be corrupt.

Dear Mom,

I love you with all of my heart and I can’t wait until the pandemic ends so we can live freely as a family.

Dear Mom,

There isn’t a job more difficult than raising three kids and getting them to school on time each morning. I don’t know why you do this, but I am blessed to have you as my mom.

Dear Mom,

I love you so much and appreciate you today and everyday. You’re my favorite person in the world. Thank you for keeping me informed on world events and for constantly sending us unfunny memes. [Editor’s note: they are, in fact, hilarious.]

Dear Mom,

You inspire me every day to be smarter, informed, ethical, and a better person overall. You’ve pushed me to do things I otherwise wouldn’t. I can rely on you like no one else, Mom.

PS what’s for dinner tonight

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Beyond letter writing, you have other virtues too, although some of them verge on problematic. Example: You’re frugal, almost never asking us to buy you anything. (With the exception of daily requests for Chipotle.) You don’t require money for personal maintenance, either. This would be good, except you’ll avoid haircuts until you look like Albert Einstein in a windstorm.

With total confidence, you will dress in clothes that are three sizes too small and so riddled with holes they’d be rejected by a nest of rats. Wrinkle management is still an issue and I suspect this will not improve in college. Still, this lack of vanity was more or less okay until it became apparent, in middle school, that you regarded paying attention to your physical self as a total waste of time. No matter what, you thought you were fine. I won’t go into too much detail, but luckily you matured and now shower regularly.

You are both smart and funny. This combo means you are capable of mom jokes so sly that I don’t realize I’ve been burned until you’ve smirked your way out of the room and I look down and see my clothes smoking. Listening to you and your friends bantering back and forth is like attending a comedy show. I am so happy a couple of your closest friends will be with you in college, because I love those boys too. Wake Forest is in for a treat.

When you aren’t making fun of me, though, you are one of my absolute favorite humans. Here are some of your attributes and skills:

• You have a staggering memory and you are good at school.

• To everyone’s shock, you turned out to be talented at speaking Chinese.

• You are also talented at memorizing sports statistics, which I hope will come in handy somehow, someday, since they occupy quite a lot of your brain space.

• You are colossally skilled at some online game that requires identifying every corner of the earth with absurd specificity after a one-second glance. I tried playing it with you and saw nothing but an empty horizon and a dirt road, at which point you snapped “Balkanabat, Turkmenistan,” or something like that, and you were correct. You are a world-class geography nerd.

• You do not complain. Like, EVER. You were cursed with a feeble immune system and spent a large portion of your childhood hobbled by fevers and visiting doctors. During one especially bad period, you missed three of your own birthday parties in a row. But no matter how miserable you must have been, you didn’t fuss.

• You are kind. One of the things I love most about you is your general refusal to gossip. Years ago, when I heard through the grapevine that one of your middle school classmates messed up in some presumably embarrassing way, you refused to tell me who it was or what they’d done. When I tried to press you, you replied, “Mom, I am not saying anything, because they are a nice person.” I had to slink off in shame. At least to me, you never say anything derogatory about other people.

• You are the definition of low-drama. Almost nothing upsets you.

And that leads me to one of my most spectacular failures as a parent: the first time I made you truly distressed. I can’t remember your exact age—later elementary school, probably—but I realized one September after you began firing a series of questions at me that you had no real idea what had happened on 9/11. You were interested in history, so I thought we’d watch a documentary together and then discuss. At first you were mesmerized, seeming to regard the events on the screen as some kind of complex but engaging disaster movie. The towers were hit; New Yorkers lurched to a stop on the streets, their hands flying to their faces as they stared at the sky. People began to flee the buildings. Firemen entered, laden with such heavy equipment they had to hunch forward. You asked logical questions: how will the water hoses reach so high? How long will it take them to go up all those stairs?

Then the television switched to an image of people leaping from the highest windows of the doomed building, tumbling upside down, their arms spinning, their clothes flapping. A silent snowfall of millions of paper fragments swirled around them. Suddenly, I realized you were no longer watching the screen. Your head was buried in my armpit. I could feel your heart galloping through your shirt.

“Oh honey,” I said. “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, I should never have …”

I couldn’t go on. You were shuddering in my arms. Little kids cry hard, sometimes, raw and unrestrained, but not you. This was, by far, the most upset I’d ever seen you outside of toddlerhood. I turned off the television and held you, patting your back as I had when you were a baby.

When you spoke again, you were very quiet: “They hurt the people on purpose.”

Oh, my heart. They hurt the people on purpose. What a crushing realization for a child: we—human beings—purposely inflict suffering on other people. And not just any suffering, but the ultimate form of suffering: terror and pain, followed by death. Compounding the agony of this realization was your own fear of heights. Seeing another person’s life deliberately snuffed out in what was to you the worst possible way also snuffed out your innocence. This thing had happened to these people, this thing that was so bad you could not articulate it, and it had happened because other people wanted it to happen.

Since then, we’ve had a million conversations about geopolitics. And science, and technology, and wars, and history. You got older, and instead of me teaching you things, you started teaching me things. You started following the news. You question dogma and analyze data. You act—I hope you act—with integrity in a world in which integrity no longer seems to matter. You write well. You got a summer job at an organization that advocates for diplomacy and recently told me you think you want to be a lawyer. You got a girlfriend—a brilliant, sweet, engaging girl—and you are open about how much you care for her.

I guess what I am saying is: you have grown up. I get a little weepy every time I think of this, but I love the person you are becoming. I love your values: how hard you think about things, how logical and pragmatic you are, how you (usually) recognize and care about what is the right thing to do. In so many ways, you remind me of my father. When I lost him, I thought I would not be able to stand it. But now, every time I hear you talk, I hear his voice, as clear as day. In you, I know I still have him.

In a lot of ways, my sweet son, you are my best friend. When you leave, it will be gutting.

But as they say: if you love something, set it free.

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Kimmery Martin is an American novelist, physician, medical school assistant professor, mother, wife, columnist, oversharer, and dog owner. Also, recently, bread baker. Despite no popular demand whatsoever, she is currently at work on her fourth and fifth novels. She also teaches Narrative Medicine, advocates for libraries, and offers writing classes.