Two years ago, summer :
Micheal and I are outside drawing an illustrative story. He is seven years old. He likes to narrate the story and suggest things for me to draw. I am stretched out in the sun, laying in the grass with a piece of smooth plywood beneath the scroll of paper. There are colored pens scattered in the grass. Micheal has climbed on top of me, like a cat or a cub, and is stretched out the length of my body, his feet just past my knees and his head over my shoulder watching as I work away at fulfilling his directions, elbows on the plywood, squinting in the bright June light. We are just two months from the date of my wedding to his dad.
"How old are you?" he asks me. "Thirty-two," I tell him. "No you're not," he insists, knowing full well my age and that my answer is truthful. "You're older than my mom." Still drawing, I tell him that his mom is thirty-six. "Nope," he insists. His toes curl into the backs of my knees, flex and stretch out again. "No," he says again, firmly, head hooked over my right shoulder, our shadows making us a two-headed monster. "You are older because I want you to die first, then Ryan (his mother's boyfriend), then my dad and THEN my mom."
It strikes me as funny, because I can't remember anyone ever telling me they want me to die. I smile but squint even harder at the bright spots the sun is making on the paper in order not to laugh. So this is step-parenting, I think, death wishes as a pronouncement of inclusion into the tribe.
"That makes sense," I pause, "to want your parents around you for the longest and no matter what."
Satisfied, he sighs, having told me something of the terms of his love.
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