I Guess This Is Growing Up

I think it's his shoulders.

A few nights ago when I was saying goodnight to him, it struck me for about the fiftieth time this week that Griffin is an almost-man. I can't tell you exactly what it is that makes me say that, what makes me think that, but the change in him, the change that's occurred over just a few weeks, possibly less time than that, is astounding. His little boyness (and, no, I do not mean boyishness; that's something else entirely)--little boy look, little boy aura, little boy frame--is gone. In its place is a strange kind of mannishness, a mannishness that's whisked the little boy away.

I don't really have very much to say about this except that I don't understand how people can stand it. I don't understand how parents can stand having a little boy one day, a little boy with little boy bones and little boy limbs and little boy lips and a little boy nose and a voice like a slightly softened scoop of vanilla bean ice cream and an almost-man who resides in his own almost-man world with his broadening shoulders and his darkening lip and his thickening brows and his lengthening legs the next. I don't understand what parents do with themselves when their once-little boys become almost-men who disappear from their living rooms, retreating to an almost-man world with walls of tumblr and facebook and youtube and skype, a world filled with sit ups and push ups, blared music, played bass, a world where almost-men live almost-man lives on their own. I don't understand how this has gone on since the beginning of time and nobody has complained.

I don't understand how these parents' hearts are okay.

I don't think I've ever heard the song the whole way through, but the lyric Mama, don't let your babies grow up to be cowboys has been looping in my head for days. The guys who wrote it, though, they had it all wrong. They should have stopped singing after up.