hug me, momma

In the quiet, pre-dawn gloom of my bedroom, someone slips into the empty space beside me in my bed. I sleepily wonder for a second who it is, and then I hear a whispered, “Hug me, Momma.” Ah. Samuel. I put my arms around him, heft him over to me, and snuggle in with him, wondering about this little soul.

Samuel is the third of four children, the second boy of three. In the roiling, deafening circus that is our family life, I often receive such parenting coaching from him. There he’ll suddenly be at my knee when I’m busy cleaning, demanding, “Kiss me, Momma,” or “Pick me on your lap.” Or, heartbreakingly, “Say, ‘I love you, Sammy.’” Or, if that’s not enough, there’s always climbing onto the counter, or running to the road, or hanging off the back porch and calling my name to bring me running and paying attention to Sammy.

What is this, this desperate need to be loved? Is it his age, and he’s only just discovered that he’s separate from his parents and alone in his own body? Is it his position in our family, not the oldest, the baby, the only girl? I remember when I was a child, (fifth of nine, third girl of five) and my parents used to say to me, “But you are our only Erin.” I remember that going completely over my head, and me thinking something like, “Well, yeah, but that’s just because you didn’t name me the same thing as Meg.” What can something so metaphysical mean to a concrete thinker?

But now, decades later, I’m seeing the situation from the other side. This seems to happen a lot now that I’m a parent. Here’s poor Samuel, and I ache to reach out to him and make him understand this one thing-that he is my only Samuel. The only one of my children that has my brown eyes. The only one with curls. The one that comes to me at first light to snuggle in while the others still lie in their beds snoring.

How can I tell him that he was the bald baby that I had to remember to bring a hat to the park for, that his cries in the night because he has another earache have always torn me up and brought me running, that his smile and his laugh are, to me, like pure sunshine? How do I convey to him that he, independent of all other things and everyone else, is beautiful? How can I say to him, I know, I thought once that I was lost like you believe you are, but now that I see you struggling, I know that I was never unloved or alone?

But Sammy, at almost four years old, doesn’t understand these things. I’m sure that, until he loves a middle child like he is loved, he won’t completely understand. That’s the funny, frustrating way our world works. There’s not, just now, any way for me to explain all this to him. So I gather him up, when he demands it, and “Hug Sammy.” So that when he does start to understand, far in the distant future, when he does have that “OH!” moment, and turns back to look over his childhood for signs that we really did care, there I’ll be in his memory, saying “I love you, Sammy.”