My Son Handed Me the Last Fry

Dear Delyara, We were in the car. Fast-food bags. Radio low. He reached into the carton, found the last fry, and handed it to me without looking up from whatever he was saying about school. Such a tiny thing. Still, it got me. Because children don’t always know when they’re loving you in exactly the language you need. He was just sharing. Casual. Automatic. No performance. No occasion. And maybe that is why it hit so hard. It wasn’t gratitude for motherhood in some big poetic sense. It was one child, one french fry, one spontaneous little act of inclusion that said, in the middle of an ordinary day, I thought of you too. I took it and smiled like it was nothing. It wasn’t nothing.