Face-love

Earlier in the summer, Morgen, came home with body graffiti, penned by three girls in his band. They had written "I love your face" on his left arm. And, "This belongs to Brittni" on his right. On his neck and stomach he had even more graffiti. I almost didn't know what to say. But it was almost like he liked it, gesturing with his hand while he talked, lifting it to take off his glasses, all within inches of my face.


When I saw the blur of letters on his skin, I grabbed his hand to look closer. There was an outline of a heart where the word "love" should have been. And the exclamation point had been dotted with another, smaller heart, this one colored in with blue ink. The letters were written with the same plump handwriting that I used to have in junior high. "What's this?" I asked.

"What's what?" Morgen said innocently. I noticed that the first "what" sounded like a man's voice, but the second "what" sounded like a kid's. Clearly, I was making him nervous. And it made me glad for some reason, as if my mom power could stop this tide of testosterone.

As I sat there examining my son's hand, I traveled back in time to when he was little and I used to draw smiley faces on his thumb. He would giggle at the tickle of the pen against his skin, wiggle his nose at the smell of ink on his fingers.

My son took his hand away from mine. But I wasn't done with the inquisition. "So why did you let them write on you?" I asked.

"There were three of them," he answered. He turned away to look out the window. "and only one of me."

"What?"

He said two girls held him down and Brittni drew on him. I've heard him mention her before, a girl I do not know. Then I realized that to write on someones hand, you needed to hold it. And if you're going to draw hearts, you might just hold on to that hand for awhile so you can do a really good job of it. When I pointed this out to him, asking if that was his experience, he just laughed.

I laughed too. But not as much. It's harmless enough to write on someones arm. She had, after all written I love your face, which is not quite the same as I love you. Yet I do sometimes worry that teenagers--especially girls--get carried away with the idea of love. I've read the Twilight series and I've seen the movies. Rather, I think my son would snatch his hand back (although the evidence indicates that the girl wrote a complete sentence without resistance--no smears, no wavy letters) as if bothered, but then read her words for the rest of the day, all the while marveling, "She likes me."

That night, he washed away the love note without any remorse. And by morning, we had all forgotten about it. Today I picked him up from school. And Brittni was texting him:

"I miss your face".

"She's persistent," I told Morgen. "Apparently she still loves your face."

He smiled. "Yeah," he said out loud. And by the way his eyes danced as he said it, there's a good chance he was also thinking, "Isn't it great?"

Back in the car, I pulled into traffic and headed home. Morgen was silent, perhaps contemplating the significance of the words on his phone. "So what are you thinking?" I asked, referring to the face-love thing going on between him and this girl.

But he didn't get my meaning. "Can we go to Del Taco?," he said. "I'm starving."

That's my boy.