Sweet Magic Puff

He didn’t cry on his birth day.
He peed on my floppy stomach, nursed energetically, made small chirps from his look out in a swaddling blanket, wandered the hospital room with those large hazel eyes and sighed while he slept in the crook of my arm next to a protective rail.
But no tears.
Ten more days passed at home without a single fuss. When finally, on the eleventh day, he stretched and squirmed, grunting and moaning, I knew this must be very painful gas.
Still, no crying.
Two weeks before his first birthday, straddling my lap at our dining room table, head on my shoulder, arms flopped at my sides, he slept fitfully. His first cold was a serious misery and each time he awoke, his nose still wouldn’t let air through.
For the first time in his little life, he cried. He wailed. He screamed and sobbed. So I rocked, sang and patted my baby back to sleep.
Then I sat perfectly still.
Besides not crying much, my son is determinedly happy, upbeat, friendly, full of ideas and either speeding around trying to carry them out, focused like an inventor in a small area of whatever room he’s in, or socializing.
This is just his way. Tears are only for serious occasions and joy or mischief is to be created wherever possible.
So when I looked down at his stretched out figure on the living room floor, face cradled in his hands, and realized he was convulsing beneath the weight of a river flowing out of his eight year old being, my heart broke. Even more so because there was no apparent trigger.
His dad and I were sitting on the couch, a guitar at my side. My husband had wanted to hear the song I was learning to play. Still a beginner with this six-stringed wonder, “Puff the Magic Dragon” came out one word, one strum at a time. For a while he and I tried to keep pace with my choppy time as we sang along, but really, it’s Puff!
So I set the guitar down, placed the songbook where my husband could easily see the words and away we flew, through a magic land of little boys, mist, fire breathing friends and love. As the last “…a land called Honah Lee,” faded is when I noticed our son’s anguish.
He wouldn’t answer our concern. He wouldn’t turn his face to the afternoon sunlight spread across his back. He simply cried and cried into his sheltering hands.
This went on for several minutes. We didn’t feel right neglecting him in his time of need, but his actions suggested he wanted to experience in solitude, this deep and mysterious pain he was clearly in. But we know our son, so we stayed right there with him, now on the carpet, rubbing his back, letting him know he is loved, letting him cry.
Sweaty and spent, with a small muffled voice, he finally asked, “What about the little boys?”
Right then we knew. As we sang, “A dragon lives forever, but not so little boys,” he went from sailing on the joys of friendship and adventure with Jackie Paper and Puff to being told little boys don’t last. We heard, “people grow up.” He heard, “I’m a little boy in danger of not lasting.”
Once he knew the lyrics simply meant Jackie went away because boys get older and become men uninterested in the stuff dragons are made, he turned his wet face to us and offered a slow smile. We all walked to the couch and he curled up quietly in both our laps at once. “I would never stop playing with my friend Puff,” he declared.
I believe him.