'You're the most beautiful woman in the world.' The scary thing was he meant it. My son was staring up at me, his huge gray eyes full of longing, his heart banging furiously in his little bony chest. It was so quiet and small, so unlike my son's normal full-throttle roar, I almost didn't hear it. 'You look like hell,' I said to the mirror. My hair was piled loosely on my head, mascara ringed my eyes from the night before. A few mornings ago I was standing in the bathroom, looking like a mean raccoon. What I was not prepared for, what caught me totally off-guard, was my son's romantic feelings for me. A preference for toys with an excess of body parts and names like 'venom.' Clothes left in a heap on the floor as if the Wicked Witch had just waved her broom and made the person in them disappear. In some ways this made it easy for me when my son came along, red-faced and furious and eager to devour the world. I grew up in a house of rowdy boys, boys with no-nonsense masculine names like Jack and Tom and Jim. More importantly, I can tick off the names of the Los Angeles Lakers, play a tough game of Junior Monopoly and have a high tolerance for jokes that revolve around the letter 'p.' What 7-year-old boy wouldn't adore me?
After all, I have nice green eyes and Jennifer Aniston-type hair, though regrettably not her long-stemmed legs.
