When I woke up the other morning, I found a stranger in my house. You could say he bears a slight resemblance to my oldest son, but not much, because my son is just a little boy.
“Who are you?” I asked the towering stranger, trying to stare him down—although my direct line of sight only reached his Adam’s apple. I looked up to his face and noticed eight unmistakable mustache hairs.
“Aww, Mom!” The stranger seemed to know me. For an instant I would have bet he was about to pat my head. Instead, he handed me a cup of coffee, which he’d made himself, then crossed the kitchen in three broad, determined steps on feet that appeared to be at least the size of those of a Sasquatch.
Unlike this stranger, my little boy can’t leave the kitchen without running around the table in mad circles just for the heck of it, sometimes trailing a toy on a string, enjoying the sound of his feetie pajamas scooching over the tiles.
A bit later I heard the stranger in the shower, warbling about living la vida loca.
My little boy doesn’t live la vida loca. He lives la vida Legos. He spends his entire day stacking block after block into identical towering rectangles, which he later informs me are dinosaurs, airplanes, buildings, or robots—rolling his eyes in disbelief that I’m unable to see what’s plainly in front of my face.
The stranger came out of the shower, and a fog of hair-product, deodorant, and cologne fumes rolled out after him. My little boy smells like peanut butter and Play-Doh.
The stranger stopped to check his image in a mirror, and unable to find an errant hair escaping his moussed locks, he lumbered off, satisfied. My little boy has a wild cowlick in the back of his head, which he refuses to let anyone near.
The stranger was now doing something in my laundry room. Curious, I followed. He opened the dryer, removed some shirts, and put them on hangers.
“You have to take them out right away, so they don’t wrinkle,” he informed me in a voice that started out bass but crackled back to alto.
My little boy’s understanding of the dryer is limited to how loud his voice sounds if he sticks his head inside and bellows, “I am the master of this cave!” Or how loud his mother’s voice sounds when she hollers, “Who left these crayons in his pants pocket?”
“I can’t wear a wrinkled shirt to school, you know,” the stranger continued. My little boy wears his favorite Batman shirt for three weeks solid. I have to sneak it off of him at night to wash it, and then return it before he wakes up.
I gathered the stranger was now hungry, as I saw him toast a loaf of bread and crack a dozen eggs. You have to wrestle my little boy away from cartoons in the morning to get him to eat half a bowl of cereal.
