Wishes

Some days, reality hits me while I am folding laundry. Like a wandering dog, my mind slips into daydreams speckled with my many wishes for you.

Today, I daydreamed of sitting at the table next to you, when I am fifty and you are twenty-one. I imagined sharing a cup of tea with you – adding cream and stirring in honey, checking the temperature, lifting the mug steadily to your mouth, tipping your head back so you can swallow.

My wish is not that you grow up to be a doctor, or a caring father, or a musician or that you travel the Earth. Today, my wish for you is that one day, when you are older, you will still be able to hold your own cup. 

Simple, unassuming, unequivocal. A wish no mother should ever have to wish.

In moments like these – and I catch myself in them dozens of times a day – I am met by my greatest enemy: the harrowing emptiness that lurks, the thud that lives in my stomach, weighs heavy like bricks, sounds like a drum, pounding loudly, its reverberations threatening to consume me.  

But then, I see the creases on your wrist, I notice your light blond hair with tints of red, the dimples on your elbows. And your eyes that turn bright when I walk in the room.

As quickly as it came, the daydream fades. I am left with you, who I have, who I love, who I will love forever, and all of the socks, strewn about the floor, wishing for their match.