Voice

I've suddenly come to recognize that finding one's voice in writing a chronicle like this is almost as difficult as finding one's voice in the everyday task of parenting. Even after two years of living with this boy who has so seized our hearts and upended our existence, every day feels like a venture into the unknown. Every day--several times a day--he will do or say something that makes me question at least one assumption about life, me, or other people that I have long held as inviolate. Every day, I will wonder--after saying or doing something myself--whether that was the right response to give, whether I should have spent an extra ten minutes reading a book with him rather than washing the dirty dishes, whether he will remember at twenty-two years of age that at twenty-two months old he asked me, in a cascade of giggles, for a kiss on his tiny butt which was promptly delivered (and will he be delighted or appalled?), and whether, when he is all grown up, he will find in himself the emotional resources to love another human being as much as he is loved by us. I want to believe that some day I will look at him and think that he is one of the most wonderful people I have ever met. Yet I live in constant fear that anything I do and say, even now when he is too young to remember, will affect him in ways that I cannot predict; and should I slip even for a moment--read the wrong book to him, say the wrong words--he will end up somehow as damaged goods. It doesn't help that we live in a culture that has raised child-rearing into something of a cult. I like to read other parent blogs (although most of the time I resist the impulse to do it), and my list of books on child-rearing is so long by now that I'll probably be reading it, if alive and well, until Sava is at least fity.
If I could speak to him as an adult for only one minute right now, I'd like to let him know that we're doing our best and love him beyond belief. If occasionally we fail in speaking in the right parental voice, it's only because we are imperfect human beings.