Revealing truths

My boyfriend and I were hanging out at his parents' house last night. Something was said and his mom started talking about the Halloween costumes he wore as a kid and dragged out the photo albums to illustrate her stories.

Sitting next to her on the floor in their living room, I leaned over the photos and was surprised at how eager I was to see these new images of the man next to me. F sat behind me, watching over my shoulder and adding an occasional remark to her narration.

First she found a picture of him as John Elway, not surprising considering he grew up in Denver too. I giggled at how complete his costume was: helmet, jersey, short pants and knee socks. I turned my head and smiled at F, before turning back for the pictures of him as a pirate and as Superman (a favorite character of mine!).

Soon she came across a picture of him in an elaborate Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle costume. Squinting at the pictures of him, I asked him which TMNT he was. Without giving him a chance to answer, I caught a glimpse of the buckle on the belt of the costume and said, "Oh, you were Michelangelo." "No, that's an R.," he pointed out indignantly. "I was Raphael."

His arm stayed over my shoulder after his gesture and now his breath was near my ear as his mom flipped backwards through his life, searching for the piece de resistance. I found out this weekend that F had a love of Snoopy when he was young, so it was a kindergarten-aged F dressed as Snoopy that made up our last stop along memory lane. His mom found the pictures she was looking for and began to describe the costume, from the floppy ears to the gloves with paw prints on the palms, but it was the emotion of the story that drew me in. She smiled as she reminisced that he just beamed all day when he got to wear his Snoopy costume, and her smile turned bittersweet when she said that she couldn't bear to give the costume away when he outgrew it.

Seeing her emotion and feeling F's arms wrapped around me, my heart began to overflow with my feelings for him. I grinned at the images of him in the Snoopy costume and the adjacent holiday pictures of him in a child-sized suit. I also felt a flutter lower than my heart, reflecting my curiosity about whether we could have a son that looked like that.