Pre Pre-School

Odie, 14 months old and wearing only a diaper, grabs the flesh of my calf for stability and stomps his feet in the mud, sending specks of it all the way up to my cheeks. He’s delighted. But I don’t watch him. I’m fighting sunlight. It’s rays are outshining the view of my angle on Gus, almost four, who is sprinting his way through Hippo Playground on this muggy late august day. I regularly hold my breath and remind myself it’s a gated park as I trace his red shirt, so small when far away.

As he circles by me again I watch the Big Boys he is running with. Roughly three years older, but practically adolescent by comparison, their voices are deeper than his. Gus’s forearms still have fat on them, theirs are sprouting dark hair that reminds me of lacrosse players I walked the halls with in high school. Every night I smell Gus’s head and I’m still met with baby smell, but as these boys run by me I can almost detect a new kind of smell from their armpits. The wrestling mats in elementary school gym. The phone booth down the hall where I’d go to cry. The rug from the reading area in second grade. Until now, my motherhood has consisted of burp clothes, family baths, and plastic toddler dishes. Tantrums, drool, oatmeal. Odie watches the swarm of Big Boys with a loaded awe as they circle us: “Wow,” he sighs. I remember Gus regarding this more mature energy as recently as yesterday with an almost fear. The speed. The threat of a small army of sneakers pounding. But today? My little Gus, my little boy, with his big smile gaping open, pouring innocence, is running with Big Boys, and I can smell, literally, a change.

We are growing.