At some point in the last couple weeks, it occurred to me that I have now been home with Ben for fifteen weeks: almost the same amount of time that I spent with him when I was on maternity leave in California. Paul was here with us for a couple weeks at the height of the pandemic in April, but for the most part, it has been me and the kiddo, every day, since March 16th. It is the longest I have spent with him since that leave. It is the longest stretch of time I will spend with him for the foreseeable future.
This second leave, home with Ben, feels like a bookend to his childhood. It feels like I spent fourteen weeks with him at the beginning of his life, and then fourteen weeks again as he transitions from being a child into being a teenager. Ben is growing up: his language and attitude and emotions mature in leaps and bounds, similar to how he grows in fits and starts. He has finally crossed the invisible lines from being what we called the “biggest little kid” into being almost a teenager. It feels like a stretched out milestone, and it’s a milestone that sits on my chest to crush my heart.
This pandemic has gifted me with extra time with my son. Even though it has been challenging to manage him while working full time, it has still been extraordinary to be home with him every day. We have had the full time together, not just a few hours at the end of the day. We have been able to travel together to Georgia to visit our family at the beach. We have watched the entire run of Anne with an E, which Ben actually loved (#canadiancontent!). We had so very many days where we had lunch together, and even a handful of days where we sneaked out to a park or went for a walk.
So today, I’m reflecting on how this is my last day of this time with my son, the last day of the bookend of time we have. Tomorrow, Paul will pack Ben up and take him to Pittsburgh, where Ben will spend two weeks with his grandparents and their backyard ravine. He will then come home and go to YMCA camp in NJ for two weeks, after which he will go to Camp Jupiter (the tween-to-teen aged version of the Percy Jackson themed Camp Half-Blood) in Prospect Park. We’ll be together again after that for two weeks of quarantine in Toronto, plus a week with my family once we are released, as a sort of coda to our time together. But I still feel like today is an occasion, a time for reflection, a time for me to look at my son and reflect on how he is the piece of my heart that has been walking around outside of me for twelve years…and now he is his own person.
One more thing: I love symmetry. And to give today a full sense of symmetry, for my last day of a second maternity leave, we are spending it with Ben’s beloved aunties. Z and Wendy showed up at the hospital the day Ben was born, part of a crew of a half-dozen friends who came in that day to see the first baby born to any of us. So today, we are going to the beach with Ben’s beloved Aunt Z and her sister, and then will have a picnic (weather permitting) with Aunt Wendy as well. They were also there on the first day of Ben’s childhood, and they will be there on the official “last” day of it as well, next year, when he is bar mitzvah’d. But if we can get through the day without the predicted thunderstorms interrupting our plans, they will also be with my son, the creature they have known since he was an angry meatloaf, on this last day of this time I’ve had with Ben, before he resumes his (mostly) normally scheduled summer.
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