My Son Said Goodnight From the Doorway

Dear Delyara, He didn’t come in fully. He just stood there, half in the hall, half in my room, said goodnight, and disappeared again before I had time to answer with anything bigger than love and surprise. It was such a small moment. Still, it reached me strangely deeply. Children change in pieces. Not all at once. A doorway instead of a hug. A quicker goodnight. A little more independence wrapped in a perfectly ordinary sentence. And mothers feel those little shifts like weather. Tonight, I felt it in my chest after the hallway had already gone quiet.