In my room sits an empty cardboard box that my middle son gave me for Mother’s Day. “I don’t understand why you have pillows on your bed that you don’t use for sleeping,” he said. “But I thought I would make you a place to keep them at night.”
This box is, in so many ways, emblematic of my son. He doesn’t always understand “normal” things like decorative pillows; he often doesn’t understand this world. But he loves the people who do crazy things like own pillows they don’t use for sleeping. He wants us to know that, in his own way, he’s trying to accommodate us, too.