There he grows again.

Recently, I was away from home for four days. Upon my return, I got help bringing everything in the house, and we began the process of becoming a whole family unit again. After dinner, my husband suggested we take the dogs for a walk in the field across the street from our house. We went out the door and started across the front yard toward the road. I walked behind my son and to the right. After making sure each small dog was being carried across the street, I happened to look at Henry from head to toe as I watched him lovingly tote one of our dogs on his right arm. He appeared to have grown (Henry, not the dog, of course). I commented on this observation, which was confirmed once we returned home and stood back to back. Chris said, "You are exactly the same height now."

My children's growth has always astonished me, just as it does most parents. Some of it we "miss" and don't notice in how slight and slow it is. Other times, they are noticeably changed overnight. Apparently, while I was away, my son decided to get taller. Because he is now interested in his own growth, I know for a fact that he was an inch shorter just a few weeks ago. He is regularly measuring himself to my height, and sometime in the past several weeks, we stood back to back just like we did tonight. He was about an inch shorter at that time.

Watching his male body grow into a man is mind-blowing for a woman who grew up with one sister. I had no experience of male development, physical or mental. Being a tom-boy, I grew up with boys, so I never noticed their changes or growth so much. Height never mattered to me, and since I was relatively short and skinny until I finally grew between sixteen and twenty, the boys who were my companions never took notice of my growth either. Being raised by a mother and father who both really wanted daughters, a daughter was all I could imagine for myself.

When we were pregnant both times, my husband and I thought we would have preferred girls. We were overjoyed at the birth of our first child when we learned she was a girl. When we were surprised with the second born, we assumed we'd have another girl. A late-pregnancy ultrasound to rule out a medical contraindication to home birth revealed our boy. In some ways, we were relieved as we had chosen a boy's name easily and even with just six weeks to go, could not determine a name for a girl. In an irrational way, I almost asked my husband if he wanted me to somehow "put him back" or "change him into a girl" as if that was possible. It felt, in that immediate moment of knowing, that some mistake had been made.

Then, upon his birth, our Henry, who had seemed to manifest himself from conception, turned this seeming mother of girls and lover of girls into a devoted, adoring mother of a boy. My mother, who is a barber by profession, has been known to moan and groan at sons and their mothers. She complains about how my aunts are with my male cousins. She lets her half-disgust show clearly at my own relationship with her grandson. "Mothers and boys," she laments, as if saying those two descriptors together explained anything. And yet, as mothers of sons know all too well, there is some truth to the difference in relationship, an indescribable essence that does not exist between mothers and daughters, and is not even the same as that of father/daughter bond. Thus, as I notice yet another growth spurt in my son, I'm thrown into a tailspin of emotion. I'm not ready for him to be an adult man, and yet, there he grows again. I guess I have to catch up, not in physical height, of course, but rather in the emotional expansion it requires to be a mother to a man.