[Bootsandheels]

This past weekend I decided to visit my best friend and her 15 yr old son down in Portland where I used to live just blocks away. I barely made it down due to a snowstorm in the area, and ended up staying most of this week. What a blast…the kind of mini vacation you dream about…getting snowed in unexpectedly and having to tell the boss…uh…I can’t make it home safely. Which was in fact the truth, but I felt like a little kid fibbing the whole time.

Many of you who have read my stuff know that I have a son who is now 18 and who has been shunning me for being gay. It’s been excruciating at times, and always creates a sort of aching black hole in my heart where I thought only love could grow for him.

Max is my best friend’s youngest boy, a big lumbering bear of a young man whom I of course affectionately call Bear…he moves like one, acts like one but has an amazing wisdom and intuition about life. When Max speaks, you want to listen. He is the typical geek teen cookie monster and Dr. Phil with a splash of Eckart Tolle thrown in…he is simply…a very old soul in a testosterone fueled Bearish boyish body. He goes to a special technical school that can finally keep up with his intellect and keep his brain stimulated and challenged, while affording him valuable friendships and affirmation of who and what he is-a brilliant boy child soon to be a man…a large bear of a man with an equally bearish heart and mind.

Last night snow fell on Portland, and here in the rainy NW that is a godsend. It doesn’t happen often, and when the torrential rains of liquid sunshine finally…finally agree to bow down before the snow goddess and transform into the more solid graceful and beautiful form of fragile snowflakes…magic ensues and is reflected like diamond light on water. Everyone seems to inherently understand this spell won’t last but a few moments, hours or even a day or so…and so…we go.

We go out and play..no talking allowed…only screams of delight, yipping, skipping, throwing, smashing, rolling, slipping and sliding in snow…the snow-snow-let-it-snow-I’m-off-of-work-and-out-of-school so-let-it-snow-and-let-me-go…kind of snow.

Max had just left the toilet seat up AGAIN…and I had just done the fanny fall almost into the water…*&%$@!!! I marched to the foot of the stairs and started yelling up to his room..”Young man…when your Auntie is in town you WILL PUT THAT F*ING SEAT DOWN!!!”…his mom quietly smiled and said behind me…”He’s outside-in the snow…” and then laughed at me as I got my snowboots on, still steamed up and ready for the second volley of my toilet bowl litany.

I stepped out on the front porch and saw Max just peeking around the corner of the house so I started again…”Young man….blah blah blah blah!!!! Suddenly I saw that he had not ONE snow ball but an entire ARM FULL of snowballs…he started lobbing them at me one at a time giggling and enjoying the fact that I kept going with my toilet bowl speech the entire time he was pelting me in the face and chest with his snowball arsenal. Now who looked stupid… I finally came too on about the 10th snowball and it suddenly occurred to me that perhaps I should stoop down and start making snowballs myself..perhaps this was the way to get through to a 15 yr old about his toilet lid habits…pelt it into him! It was ON from “Young man!!!! and kept going until we were soaking wet, giggling hysterically and happier than we had a right to be…

I was laughing with a young man-boy…not far from my son’s age and it felt like heaven…I was a human mother unit again…I was me…celebrating some precious moments with another mother’s son…and I had to be pelted by many snowballs to wake up to the fact that my heart was still ok..still beating full of love and ALIVE…

My heart has felt like a beautiful ice sculpture when I think of my son…I’ve done this so it doesn’t hurt so much as the days, weeks, months and the almost two years now that have gone by without word or contact from him. It’s how I’ve coped.

But another son melted my heart that night…with his snowballs and giggles of delight…and yes…a toilet seat. Max said he heard every word…but I still think all he really will remember is how many snowballs it took to get me to stop talking…and PLAY!!!

Boots
Copyright LKF 2012