There are times

when I fear there is no new way to describe how I feel about my children. There are occasions, such a this morning, when my youngest son recited the first poem he’d memorized to me that I felt—I felt…

How does the mind work? I wonder, as I watch him. He is inwardly and outwardly focused, concentrating in a relaxed way. The poem moves through him and out of him into the world without being diminished. Having mastered the poem, it belongs to him and yet the poem is nothing tangible, has no physical substance. Perhaps it is written in or on or by his neurons, for watching him, he looks like he is reading his own mind or memory.

Remember the lines Romeo speaks to Juliet, “O that I were a glove upon that hand,/ That I might touch that cheek!”? My feeling, if I strain to put it into words, is something like that, a longing to be—for my love to be—for his sense of my motherly presence in his life to be—like that poem inside him. O, to exist in my son's mind and soul, repeated, cherished, let loose unto the world only to remain, undiminished, inside him as he is always, always inside me.