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Anna Viadero
Sons

Sons enter my heart at two-year intervals. At opposite ends of the year. One under a night sky filled with diamonds. One into a day gone gray with fog. Their lungs as strong as bellows. Their cries in the beginning foreign to me. Now, years later, they are sounds I remember the way a master ornithologist remembers birds’ songs.

Sons enter my heart. The first one longer than my arm. His knees knit as he grew inside me, and his tendons shortened so that his legs came out bent and stiff and crooked as that old man in the nursery rhyme. I pulled his legs like taffy, pulled to make him straight and perfect and whole so that he would become as tall as his great-grandfather’s brother, the Russian guard.

The second one born screaming--his head covered with the deep red hair of long dead ancestors so that I must count backward into our histories, as on a number line, and run deep into negative numbers before I find that Incarnation’s mother’s sister back in Santander, Spain. Her hot Latin blood runs through this son, who parries with my heart like a fencer, prancing up to threaten me then backing away. Over time, I drown myself in my own pity trying to decode him. I walk into the ocean of my frustration with rocks in my pockets, his cries at my back like a foghorn calling out to me from shore…

Excerpted from I Wanna Be Sedated: 30 Writers on Parenting Teenagers
Copyright 2004 by Anna Viadero