Golden

Dear Hank,

There's a choir of plush creatures guarding the edge of your quilt. I like to watch you wade through them and settle into bed with a giant brick of a book, imaginary worlds that make your small body grow enormous.

You turned ten on the 10th and have a LOT to say, often using several words when one could do. You have eyes the color of fresh churned mud, as big as mercy. You are always humming. You run a dizzyingly fast engine for art and experiment, a very hardworking empiricist. You act as professor of facts both significant and trivial and analyst of things like hawks and cereal and batteries. I admire your perseverance, a real Hermione Granger energy. You inhabit a perpetual state of possibility, a future brimming with promise, crowded with plans. Your friend group is joyful and kind and you are a reflection of the time you spend with peers, yet still more you than ever. You are fun and interesting and thoughtful; you make us laugh and make us think.

I resisted a powerful urge to purchase you an enormous present - a huge ruby or a Rembrandt or a real red panda, something extraordinarily astounding. But you know how hearts work, emotional connections over material gains and all that. I love you to the library and back, ten thousand times. Loving you (and your brothers) feels like the whole point of being alive. 

I am here for you, open-armed and always.

Mom

going on seventeen

Dear Tucker,

It's been a whirlwind of a weekend! You spent another birthday on stage, where it seems like the light shines on you and out of you at the same time. Once they're grown, most adults are mainly walking, talking versions of the stories they've told themselves. I'm so grateful several of your chapters are being scribed in Grandview's musical theatre department. 

When I listen hard enough, I can still hear your two year old voice singing Super Boy and the Invisible Girl. And I remember her with you on March 7th too.

At seventeen you are mostly shiny and sharp on the outside ("that square jaw, those broad shoulders" according to Scuttle). You are able to sustain conversation on global politics and aquatic biology, but I like your fragile, vulnerable side too, full of moods and obsessions. If we had been high school kids at the same time, I'd have been psyched to be friends with you.

When you were ten I noted in your birthday letter that you seemed to live outside any whirlpool of urgencies. That's still true, time far more philosophy than rule. You are a perfectly lanky work in prog-mess with a strong nothing-is-beyond-salvation mindset, because of course anything can be fixed with duct tape or hot sauce. You are years away from cognitive maturation, that ripple of meat in the frontal lobe responsible for impulse control, at the age when adolescents tend to roll the dice and roll their eyes, learning to keep promises and secrets, working on the connection between effort and outcome. Someday I hope you'll understand the ultimate expression of love can sound like nagging? As you get older, I feel like I see more of your humanness, and I hope you see more of mine. You are a smashing success in so many ways, brave and kind better than intelligent or handsome. You have an ear attuned to melody, in poetry and song and science, a presence that can change the temperature in the room, a smile marquee bright.

You go around a lot like Prince Eric, making the whole world feel like an ocean of love -- and what a way to drown! Our job -- to witness you take off, swim deeper, to be the buoy along the shoreline -- feels like a gift. As much as you think I love you, I love you more.

Mom

keeping up with winter

We've seen local high school productions of SUFFS and The Addams Family, spent time with cousins and friends, at dances and fundraisers and on band trips. There've been camp overnights and snow days, concerts and scenic construction. Instead of "How fast can I get this done?" I'm trying to channel "How relaxed can I be while we do this?"

Betz Family on Ice

 Everyone was a winner in Sally & Angie's Buckeye Lake Winter Olympics!

a whole month for hearts

And a whole universe that pulls mine in every direction.

In choir, on the particularly long, sustained notes, everyone knows you have to stagger breaths with fellow singers so the music maintains one continuous melody. There might be a metaphor in that, for life in general.

Taking turns taking deep breaths and heart swells around here.

Three thirteen hour days of rehearsal
One very supportive vocal music director

Lots of new friends, and new skills