He Called Three Times

I want to tell you about the phone call I'm going to think about for a very long time.

Alex is eleven. He's at that age where the armor goes on — where boys learn to perform nonchalance as a survival strategy, where the big feelings get tucked behind a very practiced shrug. I know what's under the shrug. I've always known. But I also know the rules: you don't say so out loud, because that would be cringy, and being cringy is the worst thing an Auntie can be.

So when he FaceTimed me on Sunday afternoon while riding in the car with his mom, I picked up like I always do. He started talking, and eventually it came out: his mom had suggested he call me about a lacrosse stick. A long defense stick he needs for the season. Maybe Auntie would get it for him.

I asked him, casually, if that was why he called.

He got very serious.

He said no. That was why he was told to call. He was calling to say hello. And he had his own money. He'd buy his own stick.

Eleven years old. He separated the errand from his own intention. He didn't want me to think he called for a reason other than the real one — which was that he wanted to talk to me. He wasn't going to let someone else's agenda be mistaken for his own.

I don't know a lot of grown adults who do that.

He called two more times that day. Just to exist in the same space as me. Sometimes he likes to call while he's chilling, scrolling his phone — not because he needs anything, not because there's something to say. Just quiet company. Just the sound of someone you love in your ear while the afternoon goes by.

I know where that started. When he was tiny — still in his crib — I traveled constantly. I was everywhere, always moving, always somewhere new. I couldn't be there the way I wanted to be. So I got him an iPad. I know how that sounds, and I have never once cared what anyone thinks about it: I got a baby an iPad so my sister could prop it up in his crib and we could be together across whatever distance I'd put between us that week. I would help put him to sleep. Or sometimes we'd just exist together — him in his crib, me in some hotel room in a different time zone — and that was enough. It was as much for me as it was for him. Probably more.

He has been calling me his whole life. He just graduated from a crib to a car seat to a couch. The impulse has never changed.

I moved back home just before Covid, so I've been around in a way I wasn't before — really present, really here. But I still travel. I still go. And I've come to think that might be one of the things I give them that nobody else in their orbit quite does. Their parents are prefer to stay close to home - steady and rooted. And then there's me — calling from Newport, from Vegas, from wherever, sending pictures, coming home, leaving again, always coming back.

I like to think that through me, they get two things at once: the wonder of a world that is enormous and worth exploring, and the security of knowing that someone can hop all over it and still make you the priority. That you don't have to choose between being curious and being loved. That the person who goes everywhere always, always comes back to you.

We made our own rules. We made our own story. And it started in a crib, on a screen, across the miles — before he could even say my name.

That phone call on Sunday nearly kicked off the auntie tears. I held it together — barely — because I know the rules. But I was so moved I didn't have words for it. I still don't, really. I'm just putting this here so I remember exactly how it felt: like watching someone show you who they are, clearly and without any performance, and being so proud your chest aches.

Alex. You old soul. You keep calling just to say hello. I will always pick up.