He came home for the summer and he was someone I was still learning.
Not unfamiliar. The bone structure and the laugh and the particular way he has of going quiet when he is thinking something through, which he has been doing since he was eight years old and I learned to read as thinking rather than withdrawal, which it took me a few years to learn and now I know it as clearly as I know anything. All of that was him. All of that was still completely him.
But he had opinions about things I did not know he had been thinking about.
He had a view of the world that had been forming in rooms I was not in, in conversations with people I had not met, shaped by experiences that were his and not mine to know in the full detail, only in the outline he chose to offer me, which he offered more freely than I expected, which is one of the gifts of the empty nest that no one put on the list, the conversations that become possible when the child is no longer living inside your daily scrutiny and can choose what to bring back to you rather than having it observed.
He is choosing to bring me things.
That is what I am taking from this summer. The active choice of it. He is an adult who is choosing to be in relationship with his mother, who is calling and visiting and sitting at the table and offering me the version of himself that he has decided to share, and the version he has decided to share is generous and thoughtful and sometimes challenging and always, underneath the challenging, grounded in something I recognize as the person I was trying to raise, which is someone who thinks carefully and speaks honestly and is not afraid of a hard conversation if the hard conversation is in service of something true.
I do not know him completely. I am not supposed to.
He is a whole person and whole people are not completely known, not even by the person who held them first. I get the part he offers. I receive it with gratitude. I am paying attention to who he is becoming, not to confirm that it matches what I intended but because he is interesting. My son is genuinely, separately, independently interesting. That is the surprise and the gift of watching your child become a person. They become someone you would have wanted to know even if you had not made them.
