Boy of My Heart

by Marie Connor Leighton

I am restless, too, but somehow my spirit's restlessness takes the form of a deadly bodily stillness. All of me is waiting under a spell of suspense, and I feel that if I make the slightest movement I may break the spell.

It is my darling boy that I am waiting for.

There are girls who may think that it is not romantic waiting for a son; not so romantic, anyhow, as waiting for a lover. But I know they are wrong. They have ideas, no doubt, of a grey-haired woman with a mob cap on and a figure stout to shapelessness, so that she has to sit in an attitude of extremest inelegance, with skirts of appalling ampleness and shapeless feet on a hassock; but all mothers are not like this, though a great many very good, dear ones are. This is the sort that knows best how the boy's flannels are wearing and what state his socks are in. But there is another sort that knows a little less about his flannels, perhaps, and a little less about his socks, but a good deal more about his mind and soul; and of these latter are the mothers to whom the grown-up boys whom once they knew as little babies are not sons only, but friends, comrades, and, in a certain sense, adoring lovers.

Twenty years old! How amazing to think that the boy I am waiting for is twenty! Of course, every woman with a twenty-year-old son says it doesn't seem more than a year or two since he was born. But it really is true, and is not said from any affectation. It only seems a very little while since my Little Yeogh Wough—as he calls himself—came into the world. I remember, soon after he was born, going to see a woman friend with a seven-year-old boy, and actually letting her see in my silly pride of juvenility that I thought her so old because her boy was seven; and now my boy, that I am waiting for here to-night, is twenty—and yet I do not feel myself old.

How the years glide by!

But, after all, though twenty years seems such a very long time, yet it is not much if you divide it into four spaces of five years. Five years are nothing. They go in a flash. Well, one only has to have four of those flashes and there are twenty years gone—and a baby has grown up to be a man.

And such a man, too—in the case of this boy that I and a spoiling meal are waiting for!

I don't suppose any two women in the world would agree exactly as to what good points of body and mind go to make up the ideal man; and then, too, there are thousands of sensible people who believe that a mother can never see her children in a true light and with a clear eye. But where I am concerned their belief is wrong. I am not a born worshipper of my own kin, and if one of my children had a hare-lip, I think it would seem to me rather a worse hare-lip than anybody else's. So, when I say that the boy I am expecting is handsome and attractive, I am telling the truth. He has that best of all gifts—personality.

Personality is a wonderful thing. It is worth so much more than mere beauty. Every woman that lives knows how, once or twice in her life, at least—perhaps quite casually in the street—she has seen a man of whom she has instantly felt that the woman who belongs to him is very lucky. The man may not have been very handsome, and he may have been impecunious looking and badly dressed, but there was something about him which marked him out as a Man, with a capital M, as distinct from the mere empty shells of masculinity that walk about among us and have no power to thrill. I have always called this peculiar and rare quality in a man the "dignity of the watch chain."