To Eli on your 3rd birthday

Dear Eli,

I wanted you more than anything.

But I wasn't quite sure what to make of you at first. I'd always imagined you as a girl, but now it seems inconceivable that you could have been anyone other than who you are.

Even when you were a baby, you always seemed to know better than me. I wanted you to nap in your quiet crib; you wanted to nap in your stroller so you wouldn't miss a part of the busy, noisy world. I waited for you to crawl; you found your own way across the room by rolling and scooting on your back. I wasn't sure if I was inept or if you were wise, but I tried to trust you as much as I could.

Now that you are — in your own words — a "big boy," I look back on pictures of you as a baby and I recognize you in ways I didn't back then. "That's the face he makes when he's confused," I'll think, like I am just learning to know you all over again. As if now that I know who you are, I can make sense of all the things that stymied me when you were brand-new. Then, you were always the noisiest baby at every playdate; now, you are still the loudest chatterbox in any given room full of toddlers. Then, you were always a busybody scoping out everything you saw around you; today, you are...a busybody scoping out everything you see around you.

But sometimes I recognize new faces you make, too, and I realize with a start how independent you've become, how separate. I used to see every move you made, literally, and now you live a whole life outside me. Sometimes when we are in public places I will see you standing a little bit apart from me in earnest conversation with strangers, gesticulating at things with your hands, and I wonder what you are saying.

It's a little bit of a relief when you're talking to someone other than me, actually, because at home you never ever stop talking. At bedtime, you tell me, "Talk to me about my day," and you get very upset when I try to explain that I wasn't there during your day so I don't know what happened. Instead I have to invent what I think is the truth: Maybe you played on the playground with Joseph, I'll suggest, or you danced in the classroom with Ruby. When I tell you a story and say, "The end," you immediately rejoin, "That's not the end!" and you add a coda of your own: "Then we all hugged and went to the bakery," you'll say, or: "Then a scary monster came and ate us up." (You're very into scary monsters lately.)

Your latest obsession is "arts and crafts." "Arts and crafts time!" you exclaim when you wake up in the morning. You love coloring and gluing and cutting paper with your new safety scissors. You and Daddy create new shadow puppets using popsicle sticks and robot stickers. At school, you're crafting a hat out of construction paper for "Funny Hat Week" and your teacher tells me how creative you are, how seriously you've taken this endeavor and how much time you're devoting to making your hat just the way you envision it. (Something about a pipe cleaner needing to stick up at exactly the right angle — in this case I'm sure "creative" is also a euphemism for "extremely bossy and demanding.")

When I come home from work in the evening and you start talking to me, I wonder how you can seem so much smarter and funnier and older than you did when I left in the morning. One night at bedtime, you started sounding out words and telling me what letter they began with. ("Whale! W!") Recently at a restaurant — and I swear this is true — you pointed right at the word "pancakes" on the menu and said "I want pancakes" and then you pointed at the word "eggs" and said "I want eggs" and I said, "Can you read?!" but it turned out to be a fluke.

You have friends with whom you've developed real relationships, and I'm always amazed when I see you all playing together. Recently, we went to a birthday party with lots of kids from your class and watched you all cavort around together, giggling and whooping. You made up a game where you followed each other like lemmings jumping off a step and then collapsed one at a time into a big pile on the floor, wrestling and gasping with laughter. You love to make your friends laugh. When I bring you to school, you contort your face in anticipation while we wait for your teacher to open the door so that you can be poised with a funny expression as soon as you walk in. When I tell you we're going to play with Henry and Eitan, you ask if Gavin will be there too. But when I ask you who your best friend is, you smile and say, "You!"

You are not an easygoing child, and sometimes I wish you would sit still in a restaurant or chill out at the beach, or follow directions the first time I ask you politely not to do something. But you live your life big. You want to be first, fastest, loudest, strongest. You want to know everything and tell everyone you meet everything that you know.

You are goofy, stubborn, clever and fierce. You are energetic and enthusiastic (particularly, to my dismay, at 5 a.m.). You are brave and loud and lovely. You are mine.

Always,
Mommy