I Just Felt So Loved

In the wee hours of the morning on Valentine’s Day, I heard Clayton crying quietly on the other side of the bed. He had woken up with a sore throat and a fever and had climbed into bed beside Don, who had wrapped his arms around him but hadn’t opened an eye.

I fetched the thermometer and the Tylenol, while Clayton despaired of being sick on Valentine’s Day, what with all the valentines to give and to receive at school, and a Valentine’s Day party to boot.

“Well, at least we’ll get to spend Valentine’s Day together,” I said, casting around for some small consolation.

In my heart, I wasn’t sure how consoling it would be. It’s not exactly that I sense Clayton drifting away from me these days. We have our clogging classes together and the hours of Harry Potter on the couch. He says, “I love you,” every night when I tuck him in, and when I leave for work or fun, he lets me know he would rather I was home.

But when he’s hurt or sad, and I try to pull him to me, he wriggles away almost immediately. The girls I can still cradle in my arms; I can still believe that the mere fact of my body is a comfort to them. When I pull a weeping Sylvia into my lap, her face nestled against my chest, the effect is immediate and obvious: her body goes slack against me and her sobs peter out. But Clayton’s tears are both more defiant and more private. He’ll go into his room and lock the door, and even though he lets me in begrudgingly and tolerates my hugs, he doesn’t crumple against me as he used to.

And, of course, I am not his father, who plays basketball with him in the driveway and chase in the yard. I don’t show him funny videos on my phone or play chess with him at the kitchen table. Increasingly, in fact, Clayton’s and my ideas of a good time are at odds.

On the weekends, I want to do something. Go swimming or roller skating, to the zoo or for a bike ride. But Clayton wants nothing more than to stay put. He’ll happily pass the day at home, content with his books and the trampoline. He’ll tidy up the living room and the kitchen, and then head outside, pausing at the door to remind me, “Keep the house clean please!”

Always orderly with his own things, Clayton has become the enforcer of tidiness in our home. He neatly stacks the helter-skelter of library books on the coffee table and admonishes his sisters to put away their shoes, their pajamas, their toys. If I can’t find something I had just a minute before, I immediately suspect Clayton; more often than not, he has already tidied it away.

But this perfectionism only extends to household order. When I comment on his backwards “ds” or misspelled words, he bristles defiantly. As someone who brandished my eraser to excess, I cannot relate to this laxness, this lack of passion for putting things right. When Dee Dee devours the homework she has expressly requested of her teacher, I can relate. When Sylvia pours diligently over her dozens of sight words or insists on reading her night reader three times— because her teacher told her to!— I can relate. But when Clayton groans about his meager homework or works himself up to tears over some simple second-grade assignment, I despair, imagining how much worse it will be when it’s algebra or English essays that he doesn’t want to do or can’t be bothered to do well.

On Valentine’s Day morning, Clayton rallies to read his cards, then collapses on the couch. He doesn’t protest when I pull him onto my lap and hold him. After his sisters go to school, he lets me put him back to bed, and then later we read picture books together on the couch, just like in the olden days.

I’ve made an appointment at the doctor for mid-day, and I can sense Clayton’s reluctance, as always, to leave the house. But he goes uncomplainingly, and it’s almost fun, watching the fish tank together in the waiting room and hypothesizing about the crying babies as we wait for the doctor to come in. Afterwards, I stop to buy him a bagel— he has eaten next to nothing all day— and then we head to pick up his prescription. As we wait at the drive-up window, we watch the people bustling out of the store with their bouquets of roses and baby’s breath, red envelopes clearly visible through the thin plastic of their shopping bags.
“I’ll bet you a dollar and a donut those are for Valentine’s Day,” Clayton observes, borrowing his father’s stock phrase.

On the way home, he tells me again and again, “At least we get to spend Valentine’s day together,” and “It’s kind-of fun, running errands with you like this.” He sounds so sincere, my heart glows. It’s been so long since we’ve had a day, just the two of us.

Clayton is cheered by the image of his medicine attacking his strep throat germs like a miniature army; he is propped up with ibuprofen. But when his sisters get off the bus with their arms full of valentines and their tales of cupcakes and juice boxes, it is too much.

“I know we had a fun day together,” he tells me tearfully, “but I didn’t want to miss school!”

By the time we get home from the bus stop, the ibuprofen’s magic has worn off. Clayton slumps on the couch again, his face pale and gray rings around his eyes. Again, I get to hold him to me, while the girls sort through their valentines and dive into their homework by themselves.

The next afternoon, Clayton is buoyant when he gets off the bus. It seems his classmates were happy to see him again and let him know it.

“I just felt so loved,” he tells me as we walk home. “It sort of made me want to miss more days of school! And they really liked my Valentines! And that made me feel so good.”

I am struck, once again, by how astute Clayton is at discerning his emotions, how unabashed at giving them voice. Last week, when his less-than-perfect state reading test led to an afternoon of tears, he confessed to me, “I’m just worried you won’t think I’m smart!”
Then, too, my heart had gone out to him, and I realized in that moment that I cared far more that he could discern his own emotions so perceptively than that he could find “two details from the text to support his answer” on the test.

I don’t doubt Clayton and I will clash again soon, probably the next time he mewls about his homework, or provokes his sisters, or throws a wet blanket on my plans for some activity away from home. But all that seems insignificant when compared to the enormity of our bond. He is my son— loving and sensitive, discerning and kind. Plus, our house has never been so tidy. What more, really, could any mother ask for?