A RISING SON

I realized I hadn’t allowed myself to miss him. For months, over 2,000 miles by air and nearly 4,000 miles by land had been reduced to mere feet in my mind by the knowing that he was being embraced by, and embracing, everything about that place that had rooted itself in my soul twenty-five years ago. That knowing fed me with the excitement of possibility for him, rather than the longing and uncertainty that others might expect me to feel when saying hasta la próxima to my baby boy, now towering over me as a teenager. With his return date now visible in the ten-day June forecast, I missed him like hell.

Upon our arrival there five months earlier, I refrained as best I could from pointing out everything that I loved about the place, everything that had struck me with such awe during my own years there; I wanted him to find and experience them for himself, and that he did. As we walked against the wind down the steep, windy mountain road, his gasp was audible as we rounded the corner where the view opens to the pristine dense canopy of green to the east, churning out clouds from just below the continental divide, to the valley cascading west toward the sea. This windy-misty January was rainier than others I had experienced in the cloud forest years before, yet the colors of the sunset revealed themselves over the gulf at that very point in the curve of the road that will never, ever, cease to take my breath away. On our first walk there together, it had delivered. Without my hints of anticipation, he was in disbelief as he asked, “Wait, is that water out there?” The visible line between states of matter is hard to distinguish in this part of the world, but hours by bus below, the gulf, and the Pacific to its south, gleamed in the setting sun. Although he rose so high above it all, he stooped to take in the view, just as I had always felt the need to do decades before. I nodded my head with tears in my eyes, seeing him experience and appreciate this as I had done. There’s something about feeling the need to bow in unworthiness from our high perch to that grandeur below, to bring ourselves closer to the earth. As the sun began to set, I watched my son rise with wide eyes, knowing full well he would make this stunning trek countless times, without me.

Before our return there together, I didn’t know how depleted I had been. My own sense of renewed aliveness startled me. There’s something in our willingness to let go that can bring us back together, not just with people and places we didn’t realize we had missed so much, but in the reassembling of ourselves. Just as I hadn’t allowed myself to miss him upon my return home without him, I realized I hadn’t allowed myself to miss this place or these people, either. Just as the miles had condensed between us, the fifteen years since our last return there had done the same. My wariness of the changes I didn’t want to see — more development, more pavement, more cars, more tourists — had partly kept me away, but his excitement to experience this mythical place for himself replaced my trepidation. Surely no one would hope that I hadn’t changed in those years—why did I want this place to remain the same? That separation of space and time revealed and highlighted so many things I had learned and become in those formative years away. I, like the place I had left, was the same, yet very different, and he had grown from a toddler to a young man. He had celebrated his first birthday, and now was beginning his sixteenth year, on the same tropical soil, mostly without his birth family, but with his new host family and friends. We all had changed, but somehow managed to retain our true essence, to grow closer to who we were meant to be. The changes that I observed were what he knew to be reality, as he had been too young to remember seeing that view from his perch on his father’s back, naively stooping with his pointed finger to investigate the marching ants, mango juice dripping from his cherub chin. The same place that had given rise to who I now am was doing the same for him, just as it has done, continuously without judgment, for the clouds rising from the canopy, inevitably changing shape and form as they’re blown by the east wind.

As his return date approached, the miles expanded to their actual distance and his absence rang through the silence of our house: no footsteps bounding down the stairs; no shower running for too long; no music blasting from his speaker; no ding of the refrigerator door being left ajar; no foam basketball bouncing rhythmically on the floor, off the backboard, then onto the dining room table. With his father and sister now with him to accompany him on the return leg of his journey, I nested like an expectant mother: awakening at dawn, staying up until the wee hours, flitting from long-overdue project to long-overdue project, eating little, and sitting down even less, repeating my mantra to “just be present and enjoy our time together” when he returned, to be less focused on harping on those sounds I had now grown to miss so much. My body occupied my mind with preparations for our temporarily clean house to once again be a well-used and well-loved home, for my family to be whole once again.

Shifting from leg to leg, a fitting song from a long-gone era in my ears to bridge time and space, I first saw his curls bouncing toward the security exit, carried forward by the gait he inherited from his father. As I reached up to embrace him through my tears, I knew that I had raised him before he left, but that he had since risen to so many occasions on his own: walking for kilometers wherever and whenever he could, meeting people of all ages and walks of life, conversing in a language he hadn’t before been confident to speak, navigating teenage life in a different culture, engaging in his new community, climbing to the tops of the canopy carpeting that magical green mountain, exploring on his own. In our separateness, we had allowed ourselves the space to once again become whole.

Photo credit: Original image by Shena Driscoll Salvato