All we want is someone to write for us

Wow!

So nice, Birdie! Your son is very intuitive. Probably takes after his mother...

Very nice. Thanks for sharing.

aw I love it. Kids are so wonderful. huh.

"how hair never hibernates the way our hearts do."
That phrase added a visual that stuck with me through the rest of the story...Thank you for sharing the moment.

What Joanne said. Thank you for verbalizing so well, once more, what writers really want--someone to see us as clearly as we see, or think we see, others.

Fresh snow, a blue sky, terrific coffee, fuzzy slippers and a great story. What more could a girl ask for? I'm all set to feel good for the day. Thanks Birdie.

Um, Birdie . . . please stop bringing tears to my eyes before I've had my morning coffee. Damn. Now I need a tissue.

Beautiful. It sounds like you and your son share a truly strong bond. As he grows into the young man that is not far away, I am sure you will see more and more of yourself in him.

Birdie so perceptive. I hear you wishing someone would write about you. We all need someone to notice us. It would be an honor for someone to write about me. I took a class where we all wrote about each other. The comments were what they saw in us and if it was not some good it was done in love. It helped me grow. I would like to stand apart from yourself and write the article you wish someone would write about you. Great -very great-wonderful writing. I was right there as you described what happened.

lucky lady.

This is breathtakingly beautiful. Wow! You sure know how to write about love.

All I can say is, thank you!

Poignant, and sweet. What a gift that you that you have 9, and that 9 has you.

Aw, where's my tissue...definitely makes up for being woken early!

Of course, my son ended up making my penguin character do strange things in that panel of graphite snow!

Writing is such a gift. We don't realize how much we create memory, make people real. I'm so damn grateful.

Birdie, you must scan and post this picture your son has drawn. I really enjoyed this...thanks

Birdie, this was quite touching. It evoked a memory for me of my youngest son who asked a similar question at about the same age. For Mother's Day, he still writes a poem or short story about me (usually more humorous than laudatory, but a worthy keepsake).

is bittersweet-- but at least you have someone and family is very important. what would your life be like if you were alone?

Birdie, your son will write about you for years - I have that feeling. He planted the seed in his own brain and I do believe you've inspired and influenced him in more ways than you'll ever know. That is a treasure. You are blessed! Salud.

My heart took flight. Thank you for sharing the ordinary and making it extraordinary, Birdie. :0)

Your story is pure art - such a pleasure to read and experience.

As always, your stories leave me in awe. Birdie, you have a nack for taking simple, intimate moments and making them stand out and shout.
I think Mariana is right. Someday 9 going on 10 will be writing about you with the same love and care you infuse in your stories.

Fly Birdie fly up up in the sky! I am going to miss 9 when he turns 10 and soon he will have to shave!;>]]

Birdie
I'm very new here, and you've already managed to establish yourself as one of the strongest writers and most cared about personalities here on gather. I really admire your writing, and I hope to continue reading your work as I become more familiar with the gather community. Nice job, and I look forwards to your next piece
Jay

Birdie, your writing sings...............Writers are born, then made. That describes, YOU.

Birdie, Your story lifted me into heaven. Children are such a gift...bless you both!!
mo-zy

This is a lovely touching mother and son story. Your writing is just beautiful.

Birdie, this is so beautiful. You have such a lovely expression in your writing. This brought tears to my eyes.

Birdie, you have the flair to write beautifully about any ordinary thing that touches you in a special way. Your little son's gesture wanting to write about you in his own way in the form of a sketch of a tall female penguin is lovely. Those charcoal wings must have suddenly made you soar to the skies in your imagination.

This morning my boy is sleeping, but I'm awake, the same time he usual piles into bed with me. We both love to create in the morning, as if the time before sun holds mysteries, those secret words you can't say any other moment.

Thanks for all the kind comments, I am so grateful.

The laptop gurgled, and I felt its warm footprint in my lap as it hustled awake.

That is where you reeled me in.


Very well written.

Beautiful.

I feel compelled to add to the accolades. This was wonderful. Plain and simple. I feel humbled by your words.

Greg, Ina, and Cynthia, deep thanks. I'm not good at posting thanks, not good at responding to things, I'm working on getting better. My life streamrolls along the river without me most days, my boys take center stage, but I will stop by your Gather pages this week and leave my footprint.

I remember when I was teaching first and second grade in the late Nineties, just before the Ron Onz English Only education initiative got rid of whole language bilingual classrooms, a buzz phrase went around from reading recovery specialists to all teachers--"a teachable moment." Even though it turned into a veribable cliche after a few seasons, I always liked that concept of the teachable moment which was the moment that you found stolen away from your feverish context building for direct and indirect instructions for you students, because one of your students had provided his own uniquely rich context for your instruction or matched your own with native "paraphrasing of the teacher."

In that context, Birdie, this marvelously real, vibrant and compassionate short short story, so full of your sensuous and memory-filled associations, is a story about "a teachable moment" that you seized between you and your youngest son, and that you offer up to your readers as a pearl of instruction about sharing and collaboration and giving to others, especially those less fortunate than yourselves, and above all, the importance that writing confers by placing attention on someone, making them special, their life witnessed and not lived like a civilization without an alphabet: "Mom, sometimes all we want is someone to write for us."

For us or about us, writing gives love because it is time spent on another: Love is spending time with someone, for someone. These points and so many others about personal idiosyncrasy (the things we notice about others that make them worthy to write about) and drawing and writing conjointly mapping the self we envision of another, are addressed here:"he presses me into the page, gives me wings of charcoal, wings that sweep across three panels, lift me into heaven. "

This being a Birdie Jaworksi story, I could spend another several paragraphs admiring the skill and magic of the writing itself. How you brilliantly swept up the things 9 would like to know were being written about his Mom, from grapefruit as top choice to Lyle Lovett vocal madness, into one fastidiously superb paragraph with a great final phrase, "all my spoken, secret dreams."
How you skilfully build the teachable moment from the two's empty stories through to their collaboration--"we can write about each other"--to the final ascending moment when you are immortalized in flight in the comic strip.
Your use of careful brickwork stacking your phrasings carefully in your sentence syntax, getting a great rhythm and tempo between dialogue and description, image and action, the speaker and her son.
Your work always clears my vision because I can see so sparklingly well with yours; your language is windowlike at times and other times like a film camera, but it never draws attention to itself unnecessarily, which is why I slip into the dream of the story so easily and so well when I read you.

Thank you for this poignant, unaffected story, Birdie. You fended off sentimentalism very well and got a truer deeper emotional bond between the two
by letting the images show stories "about each other," and you give us a moment that we will learn from for a long time.

Perfectly told, as always.

I rejoice in the truth you offer.

My sweet asked me why I write just before the last one shared. After sharing I realized that I wrote to explain things, to make things more complete and sometimes fair. Some notice things missing from my writing, as if it were absolute truth. Thruth in a compilation of someone else's life in their realtionship to me is all I can offer. From a woman dieing in the street in Seattle in front of me to my neighbor's house burning a year after his passing.

And I rejoice in 9's name change...

It always amazes me what meaning and wisdom children bring into our lives.

Sounds to me like you and your son have a pretty special relationship there. Enjoy it and treasure it right now. Sure hope it lasts.... Thanks for sharing.

Sweet!

Hi Birdie,
It is always such a pleasure to read your writings, some funny and witty, some sentimental and loving, and I too am a total sap about my now grown children. What fun we had discovering the world together.

Yes, lifted on child's wings. Superb, Birdie. Your 9... he sounds like a keeper. What do you think?

Birdie this was wonderful! 9 is a lucky fellow!

WoW.

You've got a gift. 9 has the heart and the gift of his mother.

You touch so many. Thank you.

lyle - i got one right, huh? and i shoulda known you would sing off key...

yes,.... we do.