La Luna

I’ve started seven blogs since my last posting. All half-thoughts about celebrating Lunar New Year; getting a girl to break-up with her jealous, unhealthy boyfriend only to write another one about their reunion less than a week later; my Sunday in the ER; baby thoughts; Henry’s new surge of energy; and my dad coming to town. Obviously, none of these made the final stages of internet posting.

Then, the other day, Henry said the most amazing thing to me. And maybe it’s my new lack of sleep that makes it so incredible. Maybe it’s because I’m his mother that I find it insightful and brilliant. But it hasn’t left my head since he said it.

He was being his crazy self, getting into exactly what I’d told him not to and I told him we don’t do whatever it was he was doing.

“Why?” he asked.

“Those are the rules.” I answered, completely uncreatively.

He put his still baby chubby hand on my arm.

“You follow the rules, Momma. I follow the moon.”

Henry has had a fascination with the moon for as long as I can remember. When we took walks in San Diego, three times around our neighborhood park every night, he’d point to it. Here, with the clear Maine sky, stars like salt on black velvet, his finger finds it: “La luna,” he says, reverently.

We read a book about it recently. A boy, his father and his grandfather row their boat (“La Luna”) out to sea and when the moon comes out; they hoist up their ladder and climb to the moon to sweep the fallen stars off its surface.

After a semi-sleepless evening of nightmares and scary shadows, I headed to the store to pick out a new night-light for his room. I found one he can push and it fills his ceiling with moon and stars. “Ooooohhh,” he said when I first turned it on. “I like it.”

So when he’s driving me nutso, pushing all the buttons, I try to remember he lives by the rules of the moon. And when I’m not feeling very creative or sane or more tired than there is a word for, I try to remember that I made a son with lunar connections.