Be Here Now

My dear son;
Oh, if only I could freeze you in time, and thaw you out periodically to savor your wonderful toddlerhood in precious tidbits over time… to enjoy your three year old magic in perpetuity. (sigh). Oh but this would never work! My craving for your face and voice and soft peachiness is insatiable, and I can barely make it through a workday away from you! I could never send you off to Brigadoon!

Speaking of musicals, I’ve just finished casting the kid’s production if Into the Woods that I am directing this spring. I have such a special place in my heart for this show. Woods is one of my all time favorite musicals. I acted in it twice. When I played the role of Little Red Ridinghood in college, the role was so timely. I had recently lost my own grandmother, as Little Red does in the play, so the character resonated.

This time around I am approaching it as a mother, and the text is so much more profound. It is now the Witch that I am feeling, and I can empathize so deeply with her agony as she urges her daughter Rapunzel to forget the slimy Prince and remain at home with her. She sings..

“Stay with me, the world is dark and wild…stay a child, while you can be a child… with me.”

Leo is at the stage… this is such a cliché huh, to start a sentence this way? “Toby is at the stage where he is arches his back and screams whenever I try to put him in the car seat!” or “Sophia is at the stage where she shoves crayons up her nose!” or “Henry is at the stage where he calls me a fuckin bitch and slams his bedroom door!”

Anyway, Leo is at the stage where the malapropisms are so darn adorable and precious that I am no longer correcting him for fear that this baby that I’ve known and loved for so long will drift away in the wind, lost to the sands of time and my wistful remembrances.

I don’t want him to give up saying “begot” instead of “forgot”! I love the way he replaces his l’s with y’s, so his love is “yuv”, lemons are “yemons” and his best friend Liam is “Yiam”. For the ultimate combo of adorability, add the lisp, and lips become “yipsth”. Oh sweet Jesus, those “yipsth”! Those “yipths” are enough to turn me into Julie Andrews twirling around on a green mountain top. Such joy!

“Katy” you might be thinking “Baby talk is a slippery slope! Your refusal to correct your son’s impediments, however endearing they might be, could result in his being teased, not getting into Harvard, or even worse, not acing that million dollar job interview!”

Alright I get it! My kid might need speech therapy. The proper authorities have been notified. But I have a hunch that the fears are just that, and that the “yipsth” might have a brief stay in my life and I don’t want to miss out on them in a paranoid spiral of “what ifsth”.

So for now I revel in the fact that yogurt is “yorgit”, his cowboy bandana is his “alabama”, “actually” (his new favorite filler word) is “ackchewy” and shishkebobs are “shishkeballs”. It’s as if I am living in one of those family circle cartoons, except there is nothing saccharine or lame about it, it is just humor in its purest, most innocent form, and I am in a constant state of adoration. I am not exaggerating; really I am in a constant state of adoration.

Okay, that is all true, but it is not the whole truth. Perhaps is it not so fun when he screams “I don’t yike you!” at the top of his lungs at a restaurant, as he did tonight, after which I urge him to reconsider his tone of voice with the good old (but totally ineffective) “Knock it off Leo.” His response to my request? Complete aquiescence? A heart felt ”I’m sorry mommy”?

Yeah right. Try “KNOCK IT OFF IS A BAD WORD MOMMY!!”. Needless to say he wasn’t using his “indoor voice”.

The lady eating at the table behind us found it hilarious. And now looking back, ackchewy it was.

Anyway, my 3 and a half year old can be temperamental, but his rages pass quickly if he is allowed to express himself, and his kind and gentle moments are much greater in number than his feisty moments. More than anger or frustration, my emotional responses lately fall mainly in the “outed and embarrassed” or the “where the hell did he get that from?” categories. His precociousness is in overdrive, and his vocabulary is expanding exponentially while his attempts at integrating multisyllabic words result in some pretty curious moments. In addition to the “when you say fuckin, does that mean you are mad at daddy?” I recently got “Mommy you are being unethical!”. Shishkaballs!

Overall the age he is at now is my favorite age so far. People are telling me that I’ve been saying this from the beginning, but I really mean it this time!

I guess that is the lesson. Parenthood has forced me into finally being that which I’ve meditated on for so long and yet has remained thus far as elusive as the mysterious Brigadoon; living in the moment. Hopefully, looking back on these moments in some future moment, this journal will remind me of what once was… and right now is so wonderfully now.