I love you, Giant Strawberry.

Parenting from both sides now.

My son Finn, now 17, made this drawing when he was five or six. I have always felt so much looking at it that I put it in a frame over my desk.

When he brought the picture home from school that day, I remember feeling guilt. I assumed I was the giant strawberry and he was the spider on the cliff; I was clearly floating out to the sea of work and obligations, a world away from him. I couldn’t stop staring at the tiny spider with only six spindly legs (he wasn’t even done growing yet!) all alone, levitating on a cliff, yelling “I LOVE YOU” to the strawberry. I noticed an earlier version of the speech bubble had been erased and I pictured Finn’s little chubby fingers erasing, then redrawing it to better depict the magnitude of the spider’s affection for the clueless strawberry.

Ah, motherhood. This is what we do to ourselves. Did I for one moment think the strawberry was my husband? Or better yet, that it was just a strawberry?

All these years later, with a daughter in college and Finn about to be a senior in high school, when I look above my desk at this drawing, I no longer feel guilt. What I feel is longing: now I am the spider and my children are the giant strawberry. I am the one standing on the cliff, minus two legs (probably because I gave them to the kids for a project at school one rushed morning or maybe because one broke off during that time I was training for a 10K). I am the one jumping up and down like a maniac yelling I love you at my darling strawberries who are soaring, gorgeously airborne and headed out to the scary, wonderful world far away.

Breathe, I tell myself a million times a day as I watch it all happen from on top of the cliff, levitating with longing and pride and wonder. I love you, I tell them in every way I can: texting, calling, packing a lunch with extra care for the high schooler, Door Dashing the college kid, knowing it’s not anywhere big enough to express the magnitude of my affection.