Binary Stars

Planets and motherhood.

My son sent me this picture from 1,944 miles away.

I looked at it for a while on my phone, my hand cupped above the screen to see it in the sun’s glare. I stood in the Food Lion parking lot, a bag of bell peppers slung on my shoulder, the oven preheating at home, the neighbors coming over at seven, halfway between the cart return and my truck.

“Hell yeah!” I typed and pressed send.

Once in my truck, I looked at the picture again, studying that line of light on the horizon, then shadows in the rock cracks. This is the first time he has been somewhere I haven’t been yet myself. I didn’t tell him that, of course, when we were packing up his backpack-- sleeping bag, headlamp, camp towel, change of socks. But I thought about it while I rolled up the compression sacks and slid his water bottle into its sling.

Or, I didn’t tell him that in a way that let him know I was yearning to go myself, but marveling at how he could be so big to explore places without me, before me, see places my own eyes have yet to see. He doesn’t need to be bothered with my musing, the poems that are always running through my head, the dreamy way I mutter to myself while digging up bulbs in the garden.

Having him 1,944 miles away, lacing up his boots to go hiking, is a bit like having eyes outside of my body, like my own curiosity can be in two places at once. He loves the same things I love-- backroads and long trails, salamanders under creek rocks, the misty silhouette of a deer grazing. The hills that beg me to climb them turn to him and ask the same thing. Out there in the desert, I know he’s going to lie out on a rock flat on his back and watch the stars rotate across the sky, the way we’ve done a hundred times together, but this time he’s doing it alone and grown.

1,944 miles away, 1,943 from the Food Lion. When you are a mother, you measure things like this; always aware of where your children are in relation to your body. When I bought our house, I put my bedroom next to his so that at night he would be only twelve steps away. When I chose his preschool, I selected one two miles from my work. When he spent summers at my parents’, he was two and a half hours from home.

When he was eight, we used to drive to the local community college on Friday nights, when the astronomy club would prop up their telescopes on the lawn, and we could look through them for free. One night, as my son squinted through the lens, a man from the club explained how binary stars rotate around each other, both in their own orbits but together as a dance. Do you understand, he asked.

I think I do, I said.

I am not jealous that I am not in Moab, as much as I hope to go someday. I am also not afraid for him; he’s got a good head on his shoulders — though I do feel relieved at the photos, what mother wouldn’t?

Instead, this all feels so miraculous. It is as if I am the luckiest woman on this planet to have created a fellow adventurer, someone who can travel 1,944 miles away from me and will send pictures home. We see so much more this way.