My Favorite Son (MFS), now in college, was 11 years old when I asked him to help me imagine his day at school. He cooperated by describing it in chronological order and in plodding detail, just I suppose, to be funny, and probably to evade telling me anything really important about his increasingly private life. But I listened as he told about getting on the bus, finding a seat, the various bus stops, and I didn’t interrupt him until he got to homeroom and morning announcements and then the designated “moment of silence.”

We are, MFS and I, spiritual beings. (He may not know this about himself, even yet, but I have always known it about him.) But we have no formal religion, and I suspected he did not use this time for formal prayer.

So I asked him, “What do you do during the moment of silence?”

He answered, “I try to levitate.”

And we laughed. We burst into deep, joyous laughter, the belly laugh kind, the only proper response, come to think of it.

I love that MFS wasn’t bound by limitations. For him there was no line between what is possible and impossible. For him it was all possible—unlike his mother’s life at that particular time. For me there was a line. Actually, it was more like a big thick wall layered with miles of barbed wire and surrounded by a crocodile-filled moat. “Possible” was on the other side of all that while I stood bound to “impossible.”

Filled with fear accumulated during more than 25 years away from the academic world, I had just returned to college to finally complete a degree. At the same time, I was struggling in my marriage, or closer to the truth, struggling with myself, and struggling with my loud inner critic and a cast of assorted demons. The short version of my sad tale is that my spirit was crushed, almost extinguished, from the cumulative effect of a life-long unrequited desire for an undefined “something missing” and discomfort in the world.I felt certifiably crazy, and it was usually easy to find someone close by who would affirm the opinion I held of myself.

Soon I would walk a bridge over the moat, and real-world guardian angels would point to a ladder and wire clippers. Soon I would find out that my kind of crazy is okay. And that my undefined desire was simply a desire for making meaning in the world. A desire shared by many creative people and inextricably connected to spirituality. On this day, however, here at the dinner table, talking to MFS, I couldn’t even imagine such a transformation. My fears had blinded me, and my inner critic scolded me, “What you want is impossible. And you are crazy to want it.”

But I had more spirit remaining than I gave myself credit for then. And even though I remember this time of my life as a time of deep and overriding despair, I was, I know now, already taking action to lift myself up. Tentative. Tip toes. But I was, indeed, trying to levitate too.

When our laughter died down, I wondered aloud to MFS, “Levitate?”

Sometimes as a parent, I’ve felt moments of divine intervention. This was one of those moments, because I didn’t say what first came to my mind.

I didn’t tell him that what he was trying to do was impossible.

I didn’t show him the moat, the crocodiles, the wall, and the barbed wire that I knew so well.

Instead, I asked him, “Have you done it?”

I swear, magical light beamed from his eyes and shone on me when he answered, “No, not yet.”