Colin’s body is too big for a desk; still, he folds what he can of his reedy frame into one in my high school classroom, where I teach eleventh grade English. When I pace up and down the aisles monitoring the students’ work, I must mind Colin’s knees and feet, or I’ll trip. I did stumble over Robert’s gi-normous foot once – he’s six foot five and nine-sixteenths inches tall. He knows exactly because his dad measured him with “one of those architect’s lasers.” Standing, I barely reach Robert’s or Colin’s armpits, and I become painfully aware that kids grow up.

My son, Zach, who arrived two weeks early after a 36-hour labor, six pounds, long feet, bright red, and screaming, turned 13 recently. He is small for his age – 86 pounds, much shorter than I, and still sits on my lap, sometimes. We are all experiencing his predictably, hormonal moodiness, and while I keep telling myself that sullen snottiness and withdrawal of affection are normal, healthy signs emerging self and not, necessarily, personality traits, I struggle with how to parent this new person. In a moment typical of this struggle, I snooped into his Yahoo email where I found he had responded to one of those chain-mail surveys, the kind I always delete with annoyance. The questions seemed harmless enough (What is the eye color of the person who sent this to you? What is your favorite ice cream flavor?), until I came to: “Do you hate your parents?” Zach’s response: “Only my mom.” Either this was cosmic retribution à la the Patriot Act, or the bad luck from all my deleted chain mails catching up with me. Because this kid cannot hate me.

Please understand that Zach and I snuggled in his camouflage sheets the summer he was seven reading Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone aloud; we never read past the first book, though, because the dark arts scared him. Zach’s first grade teacher, Mrs. Fiedler, called him perfect. He plays trumpet in the jazz band at his school and listens to Miles Davis and Wynton Marsalis. He cried when Holly Golightly’s cat ran out from the taxi at the end of Breakfast at Tiffany’s. He spent his iTunes allowance on downloading the entire Broadway cast recording of You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown. When asked to show the camera his age in a home video, Zach, standing at the kitchen table in his diaper, reluctantly puts down his rubber dinosaur and manipulates one chubby hand with the other until three fingers poke up, looks at the camera, and asks, "Is this three enough?"

I can still feel the weight of Zach’s first pair of Keds – exactly how they felt in the palm of my hand as I held his chubby foot and wiggled them on. There was a time – before my daughter was born, before I went back to school, before the full-time job, when my day, my life, revolved around him. But that was before.

One day back then, I sat on the concrete bumper that lines the playground at my neighborhood park watching Zach play with his sand toys when a threesome of nine- or ten-year-old boys charged the play structure, commandeering the slides, the monkey bars, the platforms, and the suspension bridge. They were big and sweaty and loud. Their shoes were worn and untied and flopped like slippers. They shouted vulgarities to each other like, "You suck!" and "Shut up!" and "Holy crap!" Where were their grown-ups? I was horrified. But Zach was mesmerized; he studied them. I piled his toys into our bag and scooped him up. "I don't like those big boys," I told him. "They're mean." I was god to him then, and he held on tight while I marched to the car and away from inevitability.

Every day Colin folds himself into and unfolds himself out of that damn desk. He has intense blue eyes and needs a haircut. He is conservative, opinionated, a good writer. I think I might stare at him too much, and I wonder if he notices. He couldn’t guess. I am trying to picture his impossible bigness folded into a womb instead of a school desk, floating there, silent, just floating there – before.