His name is Ian and he wakes up every morning like he cannot wait to get back to it. No warm-up, no transition, no easing in. He opens his eyes and he is just there, completely present, ready, already thinking about something. Some mornings he presses play on his Thomas train and dances around the house before breakfast. Not because anyone asked him to. Just because the music is there and his body wants to move and that is reason enough.
He is not even three yet. And he is the most alive person I know.
I watch him sometimes when he does not know I am watching. He will sit in his play area for a long time, perfectly content, building something imaginary out of whatever he finds nearby. Play-doh, a piece of paper folded in half, a clothes peg from the kitchen drawer, a piece of string. He turns it into a character, gives it a story, narrates the whole thing quietly to himself. He does not need much. He never has. Give him something ordinary and his mind will do the rest.
That kind of play, the long, focused, completely absorbed kind, floors me every time. There is so much going on inside him that I will never fully see, and I find that extraordinary rather than strange.
And then, out of nowhere, he will stop. Stand up. Walk over to wherever I am. And say, very politely: can you read me this book please?
Just like that. From his world to mine, and back again.
It is the summer of 2026 and we are in Croatia. I am watching Ivan read to him in the shade, the two of them leaned in together over the same page, Ivan doing the voice, Ian with his whole face in it. I think about the first time Ivan ever read a children's book. Ian was a newborn. Ivan held the book with great seriousness and read in a flat, clear voice, turning pages at a steady pace, like he was presenting quarterly results to a very small and unimpressed board. I stood in the doorway for as long as I could before I said his name. He looked up. I told him he needed to use voices, slow down on the scary parts, speed up on the exciting ones, be in the book, not just reading it. He looked at me the way he looks at a calculation he is not sure about. Then he looked back at the book, and he tried.
Today he reads with full character voices and sound effects and dramatic pauses, anywhere, without caring who is watching. Ian has opinions about the performances. He requests specific voices. He critiques. Somewhere between that newborn on the sofa and this summer afternoon in the shade, Ivan became exactly the kind of father Ian needed him to be. I did not see it coming and I would not trade it for anything.
Ian loves music the way he loves books, which is to say completely and without categories. Mozart and Beethoven in the morning, Baby Shark in the afternoon, because that is how children are, eclectic and hungry and open to everything you put in front of them. I put things in front of him and he took them in and made them his own. That is all it ever was.
He is kind in a way that is not taught so much as grown. He notices if someone around him is not happy. He asks. He adjusts. If I reach for a kiss and he is busy he does not just say no, he says no mama, come here, and he comes to me instead. He makes sure I got what I came for.
He dances, he invents words, he quotes books mid-conversation, he plays the doctor and gives you a shot and announces he is pumped and runs off. He understands three languages and lives fully in one and slips between all of them without caring. His Croatian grandparents speak to him in Croatian, he answers in English, and somehow they always find each other. Love does not actually need a language. He already knows that.
He has not yet learned that the world can disappoint you. He approaches every single thing, a bubble, a puddle, a new vegetable on his plate, someone's dog on the street, with the same open, generous, whole-hearted attention. He gets excited about hoovering the house. He gets excited about bubbles in the garden. He gets excited in the same key for both because to him they are both just the next good thing.
I get tired. Of course I do. Every parent does, and anyone who tells you otherwise is lying or has forgotten. But I want to be clear about something: I do not get tired because of him. I get tired because loving someone this much, this carefully, this completely, takes everything you have. And I give it gladly. Every single day.
He is not a chapter of my life. He is the whole book. The thing I fought for before I even knew his face, the person I became when he arrived, the reason I want to write things down and leave them somewhere so that one day, when I am not here, he can find them and know. He can know that every ordinary Tuesday was lit up because he was in it. That his mama saw him. All of him. And thought: this. This is the greatest thing I have ever done.