Another April Fool

This year, keep the tricks away.

I woke in the dark, disoriented by a silent midnight disturbance. The heat of my eleven-year-old son standing next to the bed gave him a presence I could feel but not see. It could mean only one thing.

“Are you sick?”
Mm-hmm.
“Are you gonna throw up?”
Mm-hmm.

Half-asleep and called to action — a receding territory of parenthood — I swung my legs out from under warm blankets, feet quick against the smooth hard floor, and hustled him to the bathroom, hoping to avoid an acidic, wretched clean-up in the dark, an event from which our night’s sleep could not be salvaged.

We got the toilet lid open just in time to hear the contents of his body to splash into it. In the darkness, my ears did the diagnosis. The rest of this night and tomorrow would be agony.

Then my son’s scratchy voice broke into my panicky mind:

“April Fools. That was water.”

That kid.

Maybe I have shared this story before? Maybe I have told you that I was so impressed with his inventiveness, his planning, and his perfect execution of his prank that I could not be irked because I was filled with admiration for a fellow prankster? Maybe I have even shared the retribution I conducted the next day, after googling April Fool’s pranks: a giant donut box filled with carrots and broccoli?

Now that little boy is away in his freshman year of college. For a moment, I consider some long-distance pranking possibilities, but I find it hard to come up with any jokes that will tease without terrifying. Eight years after that memorable night and day, the places my mind goes are the worries I carry closest to the surface.

Today all I want are honest hugs. All I want are the voices I crave most answering their phones, my name on their delighted lips, telling me about the view from where they sit, near or far. All I want is their presence in my ear, or in my arms, entering another April with me.

Laura Nicole Diamond is the award-winning author of Shelter Us: a novel, and Dance with Me: a love letter; editor of the anthology Deliver Me: True Confessions of Motherhood; and is currently working on a memoir. For more, go to LauraNicoleDiamond.com. Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

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