The Stars and the Cookie Jar

Aiain is one of the intensely private parts of my life. Partly because of his mother, my history with her, and how that shaped his life outside his control; partly because he's a child, and privacy is due children.

Partly because it hurts so much, not having him.

And he's just such a great kid, clever, clever (not so much with the maths, but... atta boy!) and so unique. Everyone says that about their kids. But. He had a good, strong formative upbringing, and he's at least had stability since then.

(Oh, and his name's said 'Ayin', like the Hebrew letter. Never seen it anywhere else; I think she made the spelling up.) He has red-touched blonde hair and eyes that are a strange color, sort of exactly the brown-gold-red of a fallen oak leaf. His mother had them, too.

He likes reading, syrup pudding, dinosaurs, insects and mayhem. He wants to be an archaeologist. He speaks French the way you only can if your mother taught you, he's way into Harry Potter, and his toy of choice is a stuffed black bat. (If you were ever in my suite in college, that bat.) The bat is sort of a surrogate Hedwig for his Harry Potter games, though I think I meant it as a surrogate me.

When I can visit, when time and fortunes allow, he makes me walk through way too many copses, and insists on riding my horse's withers as if he had no pony of his own, le pauvre. And we go to the sea, and he still holds my hand to go wading. He has no fear of the sea; it was his mother's rule.

When his mother died, I held on to him, trying to keep him from getting hurt; I stayed in Ireland with him until my advisor could no longer hold the Committee on Academic Standing at bay, and I had to come home.
I had to leave him, and no, I will not forget the way he screamed because he didn't know, he had no idea, that a girl not yet twenty with no apartment and no real job can't provide for a little boy. He only saw that I was leaving, and his mother had just done that. I didn't turn my back on him, when I left, until I had to turn and cross a street, and I was crying so I had to run.

I don't know what those people on the bus thought. A man who passed my seat dropped a white linen handkerchief down in my lap; I still have it, it's thin, with a wheat-sheaf done in white thread at the corner. Really a beautiful thing to give a complete stranger.

I was seventeen when I took up with Aiain's mother, an expat living in a small New England city, painting, trying to go to school while rearing her child and working her arse off at a demandingly menial job. She was my boss. She was completely beyond me in terms of attainable dating material, and her accent made me melt into a large sticky puddle of infatuation. I don't really know how we started dating, but she made it clear from the start that what mattered was her son. When we had been together a year and wore rings and called ourselves For All Intents And Purposes Married, we found out she was ill and was not going to get better; for some reason, when the will was drawn, she left me Aiain. We had another year, actually, long enough so that by the time it actually happened, we had stopped being afraid of it happening. It was... like a ghost in the bed, or something, but you could shove hard enough and send the ghost over the side, banished til morning.

Yeah, we fought, and she had a dazzling temper, and I was jealous a bit, because the woman was sin in jeans and people looked at her, but we loved each other. It was one of those things. And there was something we had that she took to the grave, as if that was both our punishment for wanting to have that, even in secret. I might tell someone about it someday, but not in a LiveJournal.

Oh, God, she died, and it's true what they say, that you'd give your own life to have a person back in the world. Not even for me, I wanted her back for her son, this brilliant kid I had no idea how to take care of.
Well. I wanted her back for me too. But even in stories you don't get that.

So I guess I got the idea from her, then, that you protect and defend and never, never back down when it's about his welfare; but you also do the right thing, even if it's so far from the thing you want.

So if I never talk about Aiain, it's because it hurts as much as losing her ever did, because he's still here, just far away. He's not living the life we tried so hard to build for him, and I'm not ambling lazily into maturity with his mother, whom I loved with more of my heart than anyone could think real. I know it's the right thing for him, but it galls the hell out of me.