At about 5:20, nine years ago today, this little guy came into my life. He totally picked it up like it was a snow globe, turned it around, shook it up. Really, i think the globe just busted wide open, and shattered into a million pieces, catching the summer afternoon light as they skittered across the floor.
He really did absolutely change everything: Who I thought I was, who I am now, who I wanted to be, how I saw everything. Absolutely, irrevocably altered forever. It was the most awesome (in the true sense of the word) thing that has happened to me before or since. That is not to minimize the impact my daughter has had on me, or to say that she is any less important to me. But when she came into my life, I was already far different than the person I had been three years before her birth.
Rollie has become such a boy. No longer a baby. He swims, and dives and spends the night out and runs and goes to the bathroom by himself and buys things at the cashier without me. He likes a girl. He won’t tell me who. He is sweet and sullen. He has stickers and a keep out sign on his bedroom door and he likes The Beatles and Beyblades. He is mean to his little sister in the most malicious and puckish ways – It makes my sister and i laugh to see him torture Tiller as I tortured Lisa. And yet, he will still burst into tears and fly off the handle like a toddler. He will still sometimes hold my hand, or ask to sleep with us, or climb up on the couch next to me and put his sweet head on my chest. I understand now why I will always be my Mama’s baby, why her Mama called her “Baby” until the day she died. My boy has shot up in size, and looking at the pictures of him, I just don’t understand how nine years went by so fast. NINE.
The rest? Unless you are a grandma or aunt, you probably won’t care. It will just be some kid, pretty decent-looking kid, but somebody else’s boy. To me? He is The Boy Who Smashed My Snow Globe.
