Dear my son,
My golden-haired son,

You are sitting across me with your huge red lips, your blue eyes, and your spindle shanks… You have gobbled up the piece of chocolate I just gave you. I got away with the kisses I got in return. You are looking at the television, asking questions here and there about the movie you are watching.

I told you thousands of things in the past four years since you were born. The things I told you became increasingly complex. The number of the questions I don’t know the answers of increased. It got harder to put off the ones I don’t know. Since the day you started talking, each time you open up your mouth, you work so hard to find the right words… Still, when I listen to you, what I am mostly afraid of is not that you will ask difficult questions but that one day your sweet speech will change and the letters you misspell will be correct. Terevision, Reyra (Leyla), possibre… All these will be history…

You were the only one who could speak with your French friend with whom you came home from school, last week. We were listening to your increasingly long sentences in Turkish, smiling and in astonishment but now we have to deal with French, too. While we were hardly coping with only one of the languages, you came to be a bilingual young person.

Yesterday, on the ferry, when we were coming back from Büyükada, you suddenly raised your head up from the cartoon you were carefully watching on your tablet and showed me the orange sun going down the horizon over Istanbul’s silhouette. You made me tell you why the sun is orange.

You revolted at me when we were walking on the streets of Büyükada to catch the ferry because we couldn’t find a coach. Then, to add some benefits to the situation you find a drudgery, I said: “The best way to explore somewhere you don’t know is to walk around in there.” At first, you seemed convinced; but then you asked “But how are we supposed to go somewhere we don’t even know” and laughed with the joy of finding the contradiction in what I said.

Just now, you squinted into my face. You looked like you were going to say something that is on the tip of your tongue. Then you changed your mind. I believe, I witnessed one of the moments when you learned how to weigh your words. Indeed, you would better do because we need such a person in our family.

This evening, it will be just the two of us at home. Soon, I will be trying to make you enjoy some food. Then we will bargain to close the television. We will agree upon that you will watch either one film or two short ones; but in the last minutes, you will cold-bloodedly break the agreement. When you go to bed, you will squeeze your ragged sleeping buddy rag cat under your arm. I will read you a new chapter from Pinocchio’s adventures. Later, you will leave your bed ten times for trivial reasons. Each time I will put you back in bed and increase the level of my threats a little bit more. You will not care. When you started to fix your gazes in the space, I will hug you, kiss you, and leave your side.

Then, you will wake up earlier than me, no matter what I will do. You will stand by me and check if I am awake or not. At that moment you will wake me up, I will pull you into the bed to playfully wrestle and a brand-new day will begin.

Then, when you laugh at something with your snow-white teeth, I will look at you thinking how much I love you and whether I will remember today when you grow up to be an adult man. Then, I will sit down and write a letter that will tell us about this day…

Mirgün Cabas