Son

It’s looking like Carol’s son, age 12, will be staying in Minnesota with a couple we found there who wants to take care of him. They are well-off and kind and active and have a nice house near a lake with good schools and a skate park nearby. They also have older sons, so they’ve been to that show, as it were. And he’ll have brothers, which is great.

After one of the neighbors found out that he was going to be living there, they rounded up all the neighborhood kids at once and showed up at the house to meet him, sort of an impromptu getting-to-know-you party. I think the attention did him good. He made friends with a 13-year-old boy right away.

He hadn’t had much to say about his mom since it all went down. But after a few days of living with this couple, he showed up at their room in the night, tapped on the door, and told them that he missed his mom. He cried and talked, for the first time. They told him he could come and talk whenever he felt that way. I’m so grateful to know that he’s capable of attaching like that, that everything he’s been through hasn’t left him to fiercely independent at too young an age, as the adult sphere of his world has–at times–been so dark and frightening, here today, gone tomorrow. It would have been easy for him to turn out differently. But he hasn’t.