The Game

It all started as a game.  

The two of us went shrieking through the house until I caught him. He's getting faster. Plus, he can turn sharper corners than I anticipated so it was a genuine chase.  

But I got him. 

I wrapped him up in my arms and held him there.

He was laughing.  His chocolate brown eyes danced, pleased with this 
kind of undivided attention. 

"Where are you gonna take me?" he asked.

"Well, I caught you, so I get to keep you." I headed towards the stairs, my son draped across my arms like an overgrown baby.  
"I know of a good place to keep my teddy bear."

I dropped him into his sister's crib.  "There. Now I have my teddy bear in a cage. I'm gonna keep him here and take good care of my pet."

He was laughing.  Those expressive eyes of his were laughing, too.  

He thought he had a secret his captor didn't know about.

I wasn't downstairs for more than thirty seconds before I heard little feet pounding down the steps with giggling to go along with it.  

He flung back his head and exploded into belly laughs when I 
raised my eyebrows at him.

"What? You got out?  Okay, then, I know of another cage to keep my teddy bear in."

This time he was laughing too hard to run.

I caught him easily and carried him over to my desk. I put him into the knee-hole and positioned the chair in front of it.  "Whew! Now my bear can't get out."

But he did. He came over to where I was seated on the rocker and stood beside me, daring me to catch him again.  I snagged him and hefted him onto my lap.

The game had changed.  

It had started out in fun but now I was as serious as a heart attack.

"Well, you can get out of all the cages I put you in, 

but there is one place you can't ever escape from."

"Where is that?" his eyes were dancing again, imagining how brilliantly he would escape the next spot.  But this time he was wrong.

"You are all trapped inside my heart and you can't ever get out of there."

He looked curiously at me, wondering if I had lost my mind and was going try to physically stuff him into an internal organ.  "No.  You can't fit in here," I said as I patted my heart. "Not your body anyway, but you are already there and no matter how big you grow or where you go, you'll always be there."

He was confused.  Understandably.  

Sentimental mothers don't make much sense to playful little boys. 

I loved it then, when our family devotions were just finished and he said, 

"Let's play a fun game.  Mommy, you stand here by the couch."

I knew what was coming and stood there grinning.

"If all the mommies in the whole world were standing in a lo-o-o-ng row and I could pick one mommy, I would go down the row and say, 'No, not that one with brown hair and brown eyes.'"  He took a step closer, pointing to another imaginary mother, "No, not that one either with red hair and red eyes." 

He was moving in my direction.

"Yes! This is the Mommy I want with blue eyes!" He hugged me.  

It morphed into a family group hug, like it always does.
Maybe he's learning.
Maybe he's learning that some cages are heart-shaped that he'll never escape from.
And maybe he's finding out that he wants to stay there.
Forever.