Boy Mom

"Inslaget lik" means "wrapped corpse" in Swedish.

I’ve always loved hanging out with young folk—I babysat instead of getting a “real job” in high school, even in college. I spent my summers as a camp counselor. I worked as a nanny and volunteered as a scout leader. I love volunteering as a den mother for circus and working in the store at my kids’ school. But let’s face it, the vast majority of those young folks have been girls. Parenting our son has been a new adventure for me.

All the clichés (some entirely true!) aside, I’ve been most surprised by how fiercely protective I am of that tender heart of gold he wears on his grubby arm. And that’s on his arm, not his sleeve, because he only wears heathered v-neck t-shirts and chino shorts, ever. Short sleeves and shorts. Do other clothes even exist?

Today, my mama bear instincts haven’t left me alone. Our boy loves his world history class—archeology, mythology, origins, battles, economics, and the general whys of humankind fascinate him. Plus, he has a fantastic, motivated, passionate teacher.

Today, a big project was due, a manual with ten hand-illustrated steps for making a mummy. He could really use a good grade on this project, sure, but more importantly, he had a fantastic idea and threw himself into making it happen. Knowing him, I can see what a brilliant job he did. But will his teacher?

Every time I looked at the rubric for the project, all the requirements and the number of points they will be worth, I cringed. I could see what the teacher expected—a beautiful, ancient-looking, colorful book with a title written in hieroglyphics, something that Indiana Jones might have unearthed. And what will our boy turn in? 

Pouring in oil and covering with natron.

An Ikea instruction manual.

It’s beyond brilliant. He followed every detail—of an Ikea manual—to the letter. He has the little drawing of the parts needed followed by the illustrations to show the project requires two people who should phone Ikea for help as needed. He has the iconic Ikea figures doing the mummification and being mummified—which somehow makes the whole thing far creepier for me! 

He did his title in hieroglyphics, all right—but first he translated “mummy” into Swedish via Google translate. He measured a real instruction manual and translated the proportions to standard American paper. (Sweden uses A4 paper, remember?) And he grudgingly colored the cover and logos, but drew the line at coloring the actual instruction pages. “Ikea manuals are black and white, Mom!”

As he worked, I would get swept up in his passion, his details, his fantastic sense of humor…but then I would remember the rubric and crash back into my fear. Will his teacher appreciate this work of art? Will she understand that he respected her requirements in every way that he could while staying true to his vision—a vision he totally fell in love with?

To me, this feeling has pervaded my experience as the mother of a son. My most frequent prayer has been that the world will see his pure intentions, his delight, his vulnerability, his burning desire to share his joy with others. For young people in our day and age, that starts with school. Will his unique talents survive school?

I will be eternally grateful for his first preschool teachers, educators with beautiful hearts, who loved him, too, just as he came to them. But then the next few years school showed us the other side—he could do nothing right in his teachers’ eyes for two grades. And now, since then—for going on five years—both of us have been learning to trust again.  

So today, I’m holding onto the hope that his teacher will see the research our boy has done, the weeks he thought about how to make it happen, the extra miles he went to make it right, the care he put into its very simplicity. I’m praying that instead of seeing how the title straggles across the top of the paper, not very neat or centered, with no regard for margins, she’ll see that he translated it into Swedish. I’m praying that, instead of seeing the plain printer paper and black pencil as laziness, she will realize they fulfill his careful design plan. I cross my fingers that rather than lack of text, she’ll see the incredible detail in the drawings that renders text unnecessary.

And, if my past experience holds, being lucky enough to be my son’s mother means I will be feeling this fear and praying this prayer over and over as long as I live. I will always pray that the world respects our son’s tender heart, his vision, his pride, his joy. 

And I would not change one single thing about being his mom—unless I could open the world’s eyes to the beauty of boy energy. 

My favorite step is #10--cursing the tomb!

The Lightest Life

I’ve never been a huge fan of magnetic poetry—in the throes of postpartum frustration with my lack of time for writing or even adult conversation, I even wrote a fairly bitter poem about those poor polarized word fragments. Yet we have a set; the kids love it and even my math-minded husband has fun with it. And still, I’ve always dug in my heels—the whole glory of this insane English language lies in the plethora of words at our disposal. Why limit yourself to a couple hundred options defined by a stranger?

Today, I looked at the unused words remaining on our fridge and challenged myself. Can I express something I truly feel right now using these few dozen scraps? As it turns out, I could. I did. See above.

That I chose those words, that I might—do?—believe them, that they now will live, here and on my fridge, terrifies me. That they may be true tantalizes me.

I feel like I’ve spent most of my life building something—a nest perhaps. Tucking solid things in around me and mine, weaving tangible structures for protection, support, and stability. And every time the weather has gotten rough, every time life has shaken my tree or a storm battered my nest, I’ve rebuilt. And over the years, each repair, each rebuild has grown more frantic as I fix larger breaks, coming faster and faster, one after another.

The past two years have swept away my fantasies of fixing—both in the modern sense of repairing and the older, photographic sense of making permanent.

Two summers ago I learned that no one can afford elder care and then spent a month consumed by the specter of breast cancer. Then Hurricane Irma swept into our lives, tangibly destroying first-world assumptions of security that we had thought we didn’t have. In one sense, Irma literally sent us from one nest to another; after the hurricane, we decided to buy our forever home because…well, life is short and unpredictable and now is all we have. 

Then my siblings and I had to find eldercare, affordable or not, and we moved my mom. Then my husband and I moved our family, then, before we caught our breath, everything went wrong with our new house. For about three months, we thought no one could repair our nest. I certainly could not. Yet time moved on, we moved back in, and, tentatively, carefully, we moved forward.

Now…now we start to trust the shelter of our home again, feeling secure enough to hang the last few pictures and re-cover a few remaining cushions. Now life’s rhythm, though resting on a different—more fluid and yet, perhaps, more lasting—foundation, has resumed. I have begun to pick up my head and look around.

"a powerful healing year for you"

I’m not much of a mystic, but I think we tend to notice the astrology, numerology, and tarot offerings that we need to hear. So when I saw this prediction for 2019, I latched onto it:

In August, past the midpoint of the year, it turns out that this year might truly be a time of healing. A time after the wind rose, blowing away so much that I sheltered in, so much that weighed on me, leaving me shivering, uncertain how to move forward without a familiar enclosure. 

A time when I might learn that the lightest life can also be the deepest, the strongest, the richest, the warmest—the most of everything I love.

Growth

It's spring! It's the season of new life, growth, change, and fresh starts.

Lately, I've been thinking about how far I've come--how much I've grown. For instance, I can now keep orchids alive. (See above.) I've also decided that one of the most profound changes that's come with my age has to be a certain kind of confidence.

I've learned a lot over the course of my adulthood. And Douglas Adams had the main lesson right: "Don't Panic!" (Sorry--I don't know what font has large, friendly letters.)

--1991--

At the tender age of 18, I hadn't learned that lesson yet. I still panicked.

When I went back to school to start my sophomore year of college, I got my first-ever, very-own landline installed without the help of parents or the university. I felt extraordinarily proud of my new beige princess phone and immediately called home. I proudly conveyed my new phone number and set a time for a longer call the next day.

The next day, I waited and waited but no call came. When I finally caved and called home, I learned that my mom HAD called, while I'd been in my room. I hadn't gotten the call. My new phone was broken!

I called the phone company. “My new phone is broken; I can make outgoing calls, but I’m not getting incoming calls.”

Not long after, a technician arrived at my new university housing apartment. The big, burly, fatherly guy picked up the princess phone in one hand, looked it over, and...

...flipped on the ringer.

I died a little inside.

*****

--2019--

 

At the far more mature age of forty-six, I handle all sorts of routine, responsible things. For example, I get our piano tuned every six months. It's a pain to schedule because our tuner travels; he's only in Florida a couple of times a year. Our beloved and beautiful piano is also getting up in years, so it has sometimes needed a repair or two.

So I recently caught the piano tuner on his one day in town and scheduled a tuning. Later that day, our teen sat down to practice, then hollered, “The C above middle C is making that buzzing noise again!!!”

Without turning a hair or raising my voice, I replied,  “Adjust the picture frames on top of the piano.”

S. shouted back, “That’s not the problem!!! Why would it only happen with that C?”

After a brief pause and a few notes, I heard a quiet,  “Oh. That fixed it.”

Don't panic, my child.

Beautiful People

I’ve had the privilege of working with some amazing human beings who come in the form of teenage girls. And I’m here to tell you something: we need these people. The world needs young women desperately—not just for who they may be someday, but for who they are right now.

I missed my teen years pretty much entirely. Maybe that’s because, as several people have told me, I was “born old.” Maybe that’s because I had bigger things on my plate than normal teen life. Maybe it’s because I spent most of my teens in the 80s, when the ideal teen girl starved herself out of existence. Maybe it’s all of those things.

Whatever happened to my teen years, it’s allowed me to see other young women as almost a foreign species—maybe I have fewer assumptions about them because I don’t remember being one. In any case, I love them!

Sure, it takes a while to get inside the world of a young woman today. There’s a reason middle school girls are considered the source of all slang—their world comes highly coded. And why not? Think of how our society views teen girls as a rule. I imagine the words “duck lips” and “selfie” popped up in your thoughts somewhere.

If the majority of humans I interacted with treated me like a vain, brainless annoyance, I’d hide my world behind a wall of private language, too.

Let’s pause here for a little disclaimer: I’m not here to generalize. Not all teen girls are fantastic human beings, not all of society treats them like useless idiots, and no, we should not all aspire to be teenagers again. But. I am here to ask some questions and provoke some thoughts.

Why do we devalue ages so much? Why do we spend our whole life racing to be adult and then trying to stay young? Well, it follows that we think infants, children, teens, and old people are less than adults “in their prime.” Ha! Just look at that phrase.

I’ll tell you what, playing with a baby or a toddler does more good for my mental health than any meditation app or a thousand dollars of therapy. Babies live in the moment naturally, every moment. Lately, we all try to force ourselves back into that state to be mentally well—without ever acknowledging that we were BORN in that state. Or that we can relearn if from younger folks.

Yep, babies and toddlers do something right, something that we in-our-prime adults do horribly. How ‘bout that. I bet they might even do more than one thing better than adults! Maybe we should…appreciate them. Maybe we shouldn’t rush them toward reading and playing competitive sports and keeping a schedule.

In my life, I’ve been lucky enough to spend time with active, vibrant, centered teen girls—enough time to see behind the wall of coded culture. And let me tell you, these people are beautiful.

It’s easier to see in the woods, when all the nitpicking of the world leaves them alone for a bit. That’s why I’m a huge advocate of camping for teens.

I’ll never forget one of my most challenging campers getting frustrated with her fellow campers on an overnight. She’d had enough goofing around. She decided to show her unit how to make a breakfast over a fire, for crying out loud. She took over entirely as I faded into the shadows. She gave orders, cooked, managed, and served. Then she sat down with a couple of pieces of bacon. Turns out, she doesn’t eat eggs. But she made them for everyone else.

I also remember the entire unit thanking her and singing her praises later than night. And I also remember her running out of the tent. She couldn’t handle hearing that much praise. She wasn’t used to it.

At the time, that made me sad on an individual level. Now my sadness—and a little righteous anger—has gotten more global. Now that I’m not even remotely a teen, but the parent of a teen, I see a bigger picture. I see these girls moving through our world, keeping their awesomeness low key, and I want to bring that awesome to the world!

Teen girls prioritize relationships—with friends and possible romantic partners. You know who else invests in relationships? The folks in the blue zones who live to be a hundred and stay healthy doing it. How about that.

I just finished volunteering backstage at the youth circus, in the girls’ dressing room, for a week. I watched thirty girls lend and borrow shoes, remind each other of entrances coming up, zip costumes, talk over acts they just finished, and do each other’s hair and makeup constantly. Tides of giving and receiving washed through the room. It was beautiful.

And about that word beautiful… You know what I did this morning? I took a few extra seconds to pick a fun dress from my closet. I checked myself out in the mirror before I went about my day. And I felt great about it.

You know why? Because I just spent a week with people who do that. Teen girls try new products—whatever type they love, be it hand cream or shampoo or a new blush palette. They wear clothes they like. They give themselves a onceover in the mirror before they go. (They also wear pajamas all day and pack for a weekend in a backpack as needed. I seriously love these girls!)

There’s nothing beautiful about being obsessed with appearance, but loving yourself and caring for yourself is GORGEOUS. We cheer when gay men or French women do it—they get book deals and tv shows. Yet teen girls walk in our midst, modeling self-care left and right, and we dismiss it.

Well, I am here for you, teen girls. I’m glad you exist. I love the avenues of life that you explore. I want to bring a little of your values into my life and into our world.

Thank you for doing you! You’ve helped me do me a little better.

Beautiful food and photo by our beautiful teen!