I Didn’t Know You, but I Miss You

I was completely enamored with him. His blond hair, easy smile and always up for an adventure. And then, of course, there were his ears. Sticking far out from the side of his head, they only got larger when he smiled, which was pretty much all the time. He was always moving, from the moment his lungs took in their first gasp of air. Getting him to stay still even to do something as necessary as change his diaper was too much for him to do. A fact I learned the hard way the first time I changed his diaper all on my own, and he started peeing as soon as I removed the diaper. While giving me a golden shower, it was all I could do to hold him down long enough to get a diaper over the yellow stream of liquid and fasten it in place before he squirmed away from me once again.

My brother and his family may have lived in Arizona, while we lived in Brooklyn and then New Jersey, but it didn’t matter. My overzealous Auntie enthusiasm worked well at closing the miles. And, I wasn’t running a sprint. My desire to see him as much as possible went on for years. He would be almost four years old, before I had a child of my own, and I enjoyed loving him from afar every minute of that time. Whether it was making my new in-laws watch hours of video and pictures sent from my brother and his wife to me through the mail, or sending small gifts I thought he would like or planning trips to see him, it was fun work being a long-distance Auntie.

Once my own kids arrived, he became the role model. The teacher to my new-parent student, learning about each next phase. With my first child also being a boy, I loved getting to hear about his adventures and seeing him in action when we got together. I always stopped just short of taking notes, but burned into my brain the many important lessons he taught me along the way, such as:

• The unpleasant surprise that a film canister case is more entertaining to an eighteen month old than the bag of store-bought toys lugged from across the country.
  
• Being impressed by how much a four year old could puff up his chest at an oncoming ocean wave that is three times as tall as him.
  
• My jaw dropping as I witnessed his acrobatic dominance on the monkey bars. And how comical it was that I was following under him “just in case he fell.”
  
• How easily an only child could play the big brother role with his younger cousins.
  
• How grownup he felt when his father borrowed $20 from him when his Dad was caught out without his wallet, and how he wanted everyone to know he’d been able to help out with his own money.
  
• The lack of filter on an eight year old's mouth when he passed judgment on his Uncle for being “fat.”
  
• The fashion trend of flat brim baseball hats.
  
• How much someone can seriously HATE tomatoes.
  
• A boy growing so fast into a man’s body that he will no longer fit into a size small Hollister sweatshirt.
  
• That a ride in a Coup Scoot can turn anyone - even a 16 year old teenage boy - into a giggling kid again
  
• That there are just some people who only need one surfing lesson to look like a pro.
  
• How even a scared kid all alone in New Jersey trying to figure out how he got there will use all his energy to convince you that he was okay.
  
• That you cannot hug your kids enough.
  

Divorce was foreign to us all. All of his grandparents were still married to their original spouses, and all the Aunts and Uncles had also either not been married yet or were still married to their first spouse. So, when his parents got divorced, we were all a little shell shocked. Unsure of how custody and communication would work in this new world, phone calls dipped in frequency, as did trips to see one another. Did he get lost in the creeping silence from extended family, was there something else going on in his life, or did he just slam into adolescence and never completely recover from the impact?

To love someone and not know them very well is a strange thing. I got plenty of reports of his successes in skateboarding, snowboarding, his performance on various sports teams, trips he had enjoyed with his father or his mother’s new family, grades, favorite tv shows, the weather. But, it’s easy to gloss over the bad during occasional phone calls and bi-annual, in-person visits. And, it’s easy to assume the role of the cheerleader: clapping for the good and never digging for the bad.

So, my memory strains every day to remember the small moments - the real moments. To expand the list I just read you to include more moments when I learned something about him; those moments that I am sure were true, whether they were good, bad or ugly.

But if I am being honest, it is easier to remember how happy and easy he was to love, to be impressed by, and to dream of his future. Here is where I would like to focus my memories, because his teen years got complicated and his twenties did not smooth out those wrinkles. If anything, they brought such a stark contrast to the first decade or so of his life, it leads me to wonder: Can you love someone - can you miss someone - you didn’t really know?