You know your colors!

Ben has finally learned his colors. For nearly two months now, he’s been naming them all mostly correctly, and now there are nuances which include gray, black and white. This achievement is celebrated by me and his teachers, and also by him.

He teases me: “Mamma, what color is this car?”

I puzzle a minute, playing along,then say, tentatively, “red?”

“Greaaaat,” he intones, patronizingly and in perfect mockery of my mother-proud voice, “you know your colors. High five, mamma.”

But here’s the fact: now he is noticing our colors. Last night, we were lying together as we always do after reading books in his top bunk. He was silent a long time, studying my face. “Your hair is gray,” he said, softly.

“Yes, it is.”

“My hair is black, mamma.” Yes, it is.

His favorite book recently is “A Mother for Choco” in which a whimsically yellow, fat-cheeked baby bird finds a perfect mother in Mrs. Bear, who looks nothing like him. It’s a book about differences and needs, and how even people with big physical differences can love and comfort, and mother, each other.

“I want to be Choco’s mother,” says Ben.

“K “ I say, wondering where this is leading.

“I mean, I will be Choco’s daddy, you be his momma.”

“OK,” I say “sounds like a plan.” The differences between boys and girls, mommies and daddies. He knows it’s only about penises and vaginas, so far.

Ben calls us a family. Momma, Ben and Lily. He says, "I have a Daddy. He's in New York. He's from Africa." It's the myth he's created around the truth I have told him, that his daddy was from Detroit,and I don't know where he is right now.

He holds his hand next to mine, palms up. That way, they look alike. “Look, Momma, my hand is almost as big as yours.”

“Yes," I say, “and they look the same."

“Yes,” he says, “yellow.”

I wonder, high yellow? When will he learn that term?

He turns his hand over, then with his other hand, reaches to turn mine over. “Look, momma, our hands.” He doesn’t say anything more.

“Yes,” I say, “Aren’t they beautiful?”

“Noooo,” he says, and I hold my breath. “They are COOL mamma, not beautiful.”

Right, cool. “Yeah,” I say, “like chocolate and vanilla!” I wonder if I should have said anything, but I want to make room for the conversation which I fantasize is on his mind.

He laughs. “No,” he says, “brown and yellow!”

When he was just two, my brother-in-law's brother and his family visited from Mississppi. Their daughter, Kate, who was all of four then, was fascinated with Ben. At Thanksgiving dinner, she wandered over to me. Ben was on my lap. She put her snow white hand under Ben's dark chocolate one, and said, "Miss Cindy," in the sweetest southern drawl, "isn't that a beautiful sight?"

I don’t want him to live in a colorblind world. I want him to know his colors, our colors. I want him to know that looking different doesn’t mean anything except looking different.

Tonight at the grocery store, he asks for chocolate ice cream. He’s never used the term before, just, “that kind” before, usually strawberry or mint (which he dubbed “too tasty.”)

As I write this tonight, I look at his art on our dining room wall. It’s changing. There are “guys” now, with eyes like moons and legs coming from their heads. And smiles. And one guy with tears coming out of his eyes. And my favorite, a mountain and a village. He calls it “Promise Mountain.”

I promise you my son, we will celebrate and honor our differences, and we will always, always be a family.

And it is great that you know your colors, even though your momma winces at what more you will be taught by the world about them.

Rushdie said it best

I am still wading through Sunday's Times. Modern Love a disappointment (in so many ways.) China's images seared into my brain, a poem forming. But a fun article about Rushdie yielded this gem:

“'There’s a writing self which is not quite your ordinary social self and which you don’t really have access to except at the moment when you’re writing, and certainly in my view, I think of that as my best self,' he said. 'To be able to be that person feels good; it feels better than anything else.'”

Maybe that's what the blogging is about. Not only the rush of writing, but the added layer of knowing someone, anyone, is reading your best self.

Random thoughts on blogging

Reading Emily Gould’s piece on blogging in the NYT Sunday Mag yesterday made me think. I started this blog to record the changes Benjamin and I went through in moving here. All five of my gentle readers know most of that. Then it sort of morphed into a record of our lives for Benjamin—a way of recording his life, my thoughts, for the future. Something for him.

But as I was taught in English classes, can you really trust the narrator? Is this a bare sharing or an edited version? Of course it’s not completely bare, although some entries certainly are close. But most of what goes on in interior thought is not on these pages because it’s a permanent record. Or could be. And, to some extent, public.

Google me and this blog comes up first. Last week, during a difficult client interview, the really disturbed father looked at me and said, “I want more time with my son. You know, for things like kite flying.” I shuddered to think he might be reading the blog. He might. Anyone who can type my name in might.

So then I thought, especially after reading Emily’s piece, maybe I should take it down. But then, there are risks inherent in life. I haven’t taken any steps to obscure my identity because I don’t think that’s right, somehow. Knowing that the few of you are reading is warming to me, and I check the sitemeter regularly and try to imagine where you all are, how you like it, what might make you smile. I’m too cheap to upgrade, so all I know is geographical location when you log in and maybe your ISP. Most of you I know, some I don’t.

I appreciate other blogs I read where the author is known, a real person, not an identity someone slips into to post thoughts. But then, how do I really know? The identity can be, in the internet world, a somewhat fungible thing.

And right now? Ben is watching the Little Einsteins, and for the first time in forever, he’s actually doing what they ask—helping them blow to raise a balloon. And he’s doing that with a mouthful of cheese sandwich, his holiday breakfast of choice.

Peace, shalom, salaam, this Memorial Day.