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Before I turned 30, I didn’t want to have children. I had my own philosophical reasons--the futility of life, the impossibility of changing the world, the existential difficulty of being, and the list went on.
When I turned 30, I changed.
My life felt monotonous and meaningless. Most of all, I was selfishly scared of dying. I felt as if by having a child, I live through my children and the children of my children, exponentially. Forever.
And when my first son was born, and turned out to be stunningly identical to my own baby pictures, I felt complete. I felt ageless. I felt immortal. He had my cheeks, my eyes, my smile. I looked at him and experienced, for the first time, a kind of joy that I had never before sensed.
Today he is thirteen, and basically nothing has changed since that first jolt of joy.
I still feel the same pleasure looking at his eyes -- filled with hope and staring back at me as he tries to convince me to buy him the latest gadget. I still feel at the epitome of failure when he looks at me with eyes enraged and complains about "this boring life."
Still, no matter how he feels or what he says, I feel the impact of his withdrawal and absence when he does not look at me and keeps the silence between our worlds. At those times, I become invisible before his eyes, and history repeats itself. I feel as if I am looking at myself. And I feel restless as I recognize my own revulsion, my own doubts, my own void, reflected back at me as if in a broken mirror, my damned genes passed down to this young man, defying the meaning of time and even my mortality.
A few years after my first son was born, I had another boy whose face is almost identical to my husband’s face. Since the birth of my second son, my firstborn has lost the status of being the center of the world, and ever since he hasn’t stopped questioning me. "Do you love me more?" he seems to want to ask.
I look at his eyes, begging for a positive response, filled with impossible wishes. I know I will never be able to satisfy his desire. I will never be able to pierce the thick bubble surrounding him, pushing him, farther and farther, from his illusions of happiness and fairness.
"Mothers love all their children the same," I say.
He runs away, but I don’t follow him; he’s mad as hell, hitting the wall with his empty fist, disappearing into his room. I collapse, knowing I can never run after him, can never offer fairy stories because I know so well that the world has never been fair.
My son, looking so like a copy of myself, drowns in his dreamland, hides behind a door, inside his books of monsters and witches, spoiled by fantasies of imaginary worlds where he is the only child, the only one loved.
Slowly I feel the depth of my failure, blow by blow; I hear it with each sound—the slamming of his door, with each word dropping from his beautiful mouth: "Do you love me more?"
I crave a moment when I might show him a world where there are no limits, no comparisons, no "more" because infinity has no limits, infinity has no comparisons. This parallel world where he has chosen to live is floating within something else, something beyond mortal dimensions. He can name it "Love" if he chooses to, if he doesn’t hide, if he lets me reach for him as he escapes, if he lets me touch his shoulders, catch his soul, whisper in his soft ears: "I love you."
In my wildest dreams, my son, identical to myself, turns, a sudden move, stopping his escape. He comes back toward me, smiling, already transformed into someone I have never before seen.
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