By Adrienne Garrison
@adrie.garrison

I could have told my husband that it wasn’t a good day for kite flying. March winds whipped my hair across my face in one direction and then the other as I stood on the deck watching him let out the string. My son and daughter leaped to grab the rainbow tails of the arrow-shaped flyer he was easing into the sky. 

“Let me hold it, Daddy, I can do it!” Penny insisted, and so he backed up and let out some more string, handing her the spool as he kept hold of the bare line. The kite keeled to the left before nose diving into the grass, making Theo scream with glee. 

“Again! Make it go all swervy like that!” 

Whether he was humoring them or the wind was simply having its own way, the line went out farther until the kite danced crazily above us, weaving closer and closer to the top of our tulip poplar before lodging itself smartly in one of the branches. 

I watched as they tugged gently from the right and then less gently from the left, trying to coax it free. Theo was near tears when I lured him inside with the promise of hot chocolate, and when Dan and Penny came in their cheeks were pink from the cold. 

Penny shook her head. “Daddy cut it loose and now it’s gone,” she said.

“Well, maybe not forever,” he clarified. “It blew out of the tree and over the roof. I think it will come down somewhere in the neighborhood and we can just reattach it again, no problem.” He widened his eyes at me for a moment as he pulled off his coat, and I could see he was mentally adding an identical kite to our Amazon cart. 

“No harm done,” I said. “I’m sure it will turn up.”

***

Taking my first child—a daughter—into my arms for the very first time was both a rush of absolute joy and a jagged twist of fear. I couldn’t have known it would have cost me so much to labor her into the world, and once she arrived I was awash with my own vulnerability. I felt hyper-aware of my tenuous capacity to even bring her into the light, let alone sustain her out here, where so much could harm her. I loved her completely. I was also completely afraid.

Nearly three years later at the birth of my son, I was no longer haunted by the fear that I could (and absolutely would) fail to protect my children from every harm. When he came rushing into the world, I simply embraced him in love. It was a deluge of that single emotion: joy. I kissed his sweet face, knew him immediately, and settled back into the bed to celebrate this small life entrusted to me. In minutes, he latched onto me. In minutes, we were the only two people in the world. And yet, even then, in that sweet stretch of contentment, I began to hear the faint ticking of a clock on the wall, the passage of time that would follow me for years to come. Even in my joy, I felt a grief for the day that would come when he was no longer mine.

My mom had warned me that I might feel a different sort of love for my son. Not a deeper or greater love, but a less complicated, more effusive bond. How else could I describe the immediate and utter infatuation with this son of mine? Surely so much of it was due to the fact that it was easier the second time. But how to explain the thought I had in the very first hour of his life that one day, a woman would claim his love and walk away with half of my heart? That our relationship had an end date was not a fear I had to navigate with my daughter. Why? I didn’t love her any less. Why did it feel so much more vulnerable this time?

***

Several weeks went by before it caught my eye. Schlepping our two-year-old son up the hill in one arm and his red tryke in the other, I paused to catch my breath and was distracted by a primary-colored scrap of fabric snapping in the canopy of a huge sycamore tree. The kite, I thought, but said nothing, not wanting to reinitiate the whining and wondering from the kids as to why it hadn’t reappeared like we’d said. Breathless, I couldn’t seem to look away from the place where it was caught, at the end of a bare white limb, poised like a bird ready to take flight. Something about it made me terribly sad.

***

There were long hours of nursing in that first year when I batted away the fear of my son walking out of my life one day, and long hours when I followed my thoughts down hopeless roads, trying to explain away the worry. 

“I think what it boils down to,” I told a friend in a gush of hormonal confession, “is that I don’t have a clear idea of what a healthy adult mother-son relationship looks like, to show me how not to smother him or be outgrown like a pair of shoes.”

“I can’t say that I have an example that I’m particularly striving for,” she acknowledged, thinking of her own son, “but honestly, I just don’t think about it. There are a million things ahead to worry about. Why is this one troubling you so much? It’s eons away.”

My husband was no help, either. “I don’t know, babe. Maybe what you think you see when you look at other mother-son relationships isn’t the whole picture. Maybe the mom doesn’t actually fade into the background the moment he falls in love.” I shrug off his words, wishing he had something more to offer than sheer speculation. 

When the time for weaning came, I slept in the guest room for weeks, letting my husband manage bedtime and wake-ups, unable to bear the sensation of pulling back from Theo, or withholding anything from him, even something we were both ready to release. 

***

Two springs have passed since the kite was cut loose, and it remains snagged in the branch of the sycamore across the street. Still bright and birdlike up there, still kindling an ache deep in my soul when I spot it against the contrails and bright blue of the sky beyond. 

This May, I will welcome another son into the world. The metaphorical clock still ticks in the background as I snuggle with Theo at night before bed, delighting in the round fullness of his cheeks—his babyhood still evident, but rapidly giving way to boyhood. When the OB office called me in November to tell me this third and final baby was male, I felt myself pulling back from the news. I had been certain it was a girl, ready with a name and a half-dozen bins of girl’s clothing to welcome her. But a boy again? It wasn’t so much a disappointment, but a kind of grief, knowing there would soon be two clocks on the wall of my heart, each of them counting down our days together. 

In the long final weeks of this pregnancy, I’ve woken restless in the night, trying to unravel this fear of having my love cut off at the source, what feels like the inevitable oncoming loss of a son. And yet, as my stomach stretches, aching with the tension of holding this growing, living boy, I wake up to another truth—just like this baby rapidly outgrowing the safe and warm shell of my body, each of my children will, in turn, break free from the walls of my care. I will need them to. 

***

The tragedy of that bright, branch-bound kite holds the key to the true fear hiding underneath. It’s not the concern of being cut loose from my children’s lives, but rather the worry that years from now, I might get snagged, veering left and right in the wide expanse of their future. It is not so much about them being no longer mine, but about being stuck in a love that couldn’t grow or adapt alongside them.

That this bond between us will widen and stretch, and even snap free someday is inevitable. I know it is true for all three of my children. I know that, in time, I will hope for it, wanting them to be free and fully unfettered for what life has for them. The clocks on the wall of my heart remind me how much time I have to learn and relearn new rhythms of love in the years to come. When another son is placed in my arms, I will breathe in the sweet blessing of his life and remember that my body has already shown me the way—when to grow, when to change, and even when to let go.