Pour ceux que j'aime

So it's been a tough road recently, parenting Geo. I don't know if it's being four, being a big brother or being in school (most likely all of the above) but I've felt like my sunny, cheerful boy has been replaced some days by a totally different person. Angry, temperamental, sort of teenager-ish. We've had lots of door-slamming and foot-stomping and all-around unpleasantness. Many, many days it's been much easier to be a good mom to Mazen, whose needs are so simple. Eat, sleep, change diaper, coo, smile. With Geo, it's negotiating difficult relationships at school, teaching the finer points of manners (examples: the truth bomb posts), reminding him not to pick his nose; the constant, joyless grind part of parenting.

And then there are these flashes, these moments that shine through to remind me what a great kid he is and how much I like this little person.

Today he brought home from school a box for C and I. It's a combined Mother's/Father's Day gift. I opened it up; it was prettily painted. Inside were three folded pieces of paper, one blue, one green and one orange. Geo picked the blue one first, unfolded it and "read" me a poem. Then he "read" the orange one, then the green one. Hearing his French, watching him make the hand gestures that the teacher must have spent so much time drilling into the heads of 28 four-year-olds, was so moving. And he was so proud of himself! At the end, he told me, "See, mama, I know how to read!"

And then, after his shower I was getting him in his pj's. C went out to dinner with an out-of-town colleague tonight, and Geo was telling me how much he missed his Baba at dinner. "I didn't even get to find out what he had for lunch," he told me sadly. Because every night at dinner, Geo asks C how his day was, if he saw his friends, and what he ate at lunch.

And later, putting him in bed, he recited one more time "Un petit poeme pour ceux que j'aime" and told me they'd been working on it for a long time, Maitresse had told them to keep it a secret.

It was the best kind of secret.