Around 10:30 PM.
I quietly enter our house and lock the door behind me.
“Was work busy?” Amy says from the stairs.
“It’s been worse,” I sigh putting my work bag down, “Are the kids asleep?”
They should be. Last time I got home from work this late, Sun Su was lying in wait under his blankets until I checked in on him and he surprised me with a cheerful, “Hi appah.” I secretly hope the kids are awake when I get home.“They’re asleep. Sun Su couldn’t sleep at first,” Amy says coming down the stairs with soft urgency. “He said he was afraid.”
“Afraid of what?”
“Of being a grown-up.”
“What? Anything specific?”
“That’s all he would say. So I told him about all the fun things he can do when he’s grown up – he can go wherever he wants, go to sleep when he wants, buy what he wants, get a job doing what he likes.”
Can I trade in my grown-up life for that one too?“Guess we need to cut back on the talk about growing up.”
“Yeah,” I think for a moment. “Yesterday, I joked that someday he’d be too big for me to lift him up and he’d have to pick me up instead, like Luke and Yoda.”
“I don’t think he liked it when I said someday he’ll be able to get his own house and live wherever he wants. He said he wanted to live two houses down.”
I didn’t like telling him that either. Sometimes I forget our empathetic link goes both ways.“It’s probably kind of overwhelming to him.”
Me too.“I put him back to bed and told him he thinks too much. Like you.”
That’s often not a good thing, but I can’t help but smile anyways.“How’s Ooseung?”
Our little girl tends to thrash around before sleep. She often ends up sideways or upside down in bed.“No issues. She fell asleep fast.”
“Like you.”
Just kidding, we have to be adults don’t we?