Wild Hearts

The girl’s skin was translucent, so pale, the fine blue veins glowed beneath the soft down of her cheeks. A cloud of white curls framed a set of glacier eyes, a scorch of light blue, flashing trinkets of bright quickness under the shade of her half mast gaze.

Delicate bone structure, the promise of height foretold in the child’s long limbs and graceful neck, she moved like a dancer through the halls, fleeting smiles breaking the serious set of her strangely beautiful face.

A girl not inclined towards lightness, this steely, brilliant child was given the trappings of an ethereal fairy, a breathtakingly magnificent creature under a starlit sky on a snow drenched landscape, diminished under the dry, southern sun where she’d been mistakenly transplanted from the dark forests of Maine.

My boy fell in love with this strange girl two years ago, drawn to her radiant light and serious touch. He found her stark difference appealing, a welcome change from the tanned, bouncing ponytails hiding under the giggling skins of small monsters who cruelly rule the playground.

Carefully stowing small gifts, treasures and handwritten cards off to school, he has been steadily wooing this womanchild with careful consideration, watching her return the affection in equal measure has made his heart grow past painful timidity into stocky boldness. She plies him with smiles, pocketful’s of tic tacs, kind words and surreptitious handholds under the vast oaks shading the playground. Brigitte comfortably calls him boyfriend in her quiet, firm voice. I’m not surprised that he chose her, this girl of shadows and blinding light.

I’ve been watching my boy, this second son of mine, venture into a place where soft hearts get crushed on the inevitable steps to manhood. I remember a raw-boned girl, Appalachia singing off her young skin with a sharp tang, a splash of freckles crossing her tawny cheeks, take my firstborn by the throat and slay him with her sweet love. A girl twelve years old, more capable and swift out of sheer, natural-born instinct, commanded his heart with fluid ease and treated it gently. She hadn’t yet learned to do otherwise.

As a mother of sons, this carousel ride on their first spin at love makes me clench, a boy’s first broken heart is no small matter, neither is his unbridled joy. I have one more child to go before I watch all of the men born of my womb enter the world where the smell of sex takes center stage and this easy simplicity of the heart’s natural craving falls into the reeds.

Oblivious adults routinely dismiss the intensity of a child’s first brush with love, scoffing off that initial, searing intake of breath their offspring experience before watching them plunge towards independence, as nonsense. Treating the matter as an inconsequential passing, sidestepping it as some small matter of no importance, conveniently forgetting the intensity of our first innocent passion, that one we still remember, is just plain wrong.

Counting first love as a meaningless stepping stone is to discount the magnitude of feeling that a child’s wild, undamaged heart can generate. It’s a sin against the soul, in my book, to toss off this innocent passion, so naturally uncomplicated and exquisitely magnificent, as a mere trifle. We diminish life when we brush off our children’s innate capacity to love.