Tag: sons

Graduation Gift

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I’m stumped on a graduation gift for my son. It seems he has everything he needs right now. And the things he doesn’t have, I can’t afford. Actually, I can’t afford much at the moment, so it’s good he has what he needs.

I put this issue in the hands of my fourteen-year-old as we walked around the mall Wednesday on a mission to return a purchase. We were browsing the electronics store and the game store, and I thought maybe he would spot something worthy of a graduation gift for his brother.

As we strolled, W suddenly veered into the mall chocolate shop. “I think I found a graduation gift,” he said, as he walked toward the display of colorfully wrapped truffles. The display was full and nearly spilling over. There was a sign that boasted the current “deal” on a bag of these sweet chocolaty treats.

“We can get him a bag of 50 truffles,” W told me, pointing to the sign. I read the line to which he was pointing, and I read it a second time. I cocked my head slightly, perplexed by the discrepancy between what I was seeing and what he was saying. I read the line above W’s finger, and the line below.

“That says there is a deal on a bag of 75 truffles,” I told him. “Where do you see ’50 truffles’?”

“Well, I don’t,” W admitted. “But by the time we give it to him, it will be a bag of 50!”

Ah, always thinking, that kid—50 truffles for the graduate, 25 for the little brother. What a perfect graduation gift!

Cookies

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I picked up my son from the eighth grade class trip (very) late on Friday night (technically, the wee hours of Saturday morning). On the drive home, there was a tired, train-of-thought conversation that involved discussion of the things my deep thinker had been churning in his mind on the 12-hour bus ride home.

“You know, the Capitol dome was constructed of cast iron,” he told me. “In the 1850s and 60s,” he added. “That must have been quite a feat of engineering.” He stared out the window as the darkness passed by while he thought. “I wonder how they had the technology to get that up there back then.”

Nearly nine million pounds of ironwork, I have learned. My son thinks about the process of construction: how they created this immense structure. How they managed to move it to the top of the Capitol building. Meanwhile, my mother-mind wonders about the safety of the building on which that weight is resting and the lives of the people within that building. That’s a lot of weight for the walls and foundation to hold.

“And you know,” he continued, breaking me our of my reverie and revealing the randomness of his reflection. “The National Archives are much harder to get into than Nicolas Cage makes it seem.” I chuckled as my mind drifted to thoughts of the movie, National Treasure.

“Of course,” I told him. “That’s Hollywood. They had to make it possible, or the story line wouldn’t have worked.”

“Yeah,” he agreed. “I just wanted to point that out. It’s really hard to get in there.”

“I’m sure it is. Think about what’s in there.” I paused to see if he had anything else to add. The silence stretched until I asked, ”Did you finish all the cookies I sent?”

“Oh, I finished those a long time ago… on the bus ride down on Tuesday.”

“Did you share them?”

“I tried.”

“What do you mean, ‘you tried’?” I asked.

“Nobody wanted any,” he stated, as if teenagers don’t get hungry.

I puzzled over this one for a minute. Eighth grade boys and homemade cookies. This didn’t seem right to me. “No one wanted any? Did you offer them one?”

“Well,” he hedged. “I probably could have done better with that.”

“You didn’t offer one to anyone, did you?”

“Yes, I did.” he said.

“And….”

“Well, when I offered one to Jon, he was wearing ear buds.” He paused here before he said, “He didn’t answer.”

“So you ate them all?”

Even in the darkness of the car, I could see the smirk on his face.

Few Words

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My son is on his school’s annual 8th grade class trip. He is my youngest. He is the third child to go on this class trip. And he is the child of the fewest words.

My first child FaceTimed with me from the long bus ride from our town to the 8th grade destination. It was the day after his birthday, and I had sent cookies on the bus. Likely, there were not enough cookies for everyone on the bus, but he had a lot of cookies. And he wanted to show me all of the fun they were having on the bus.

My second child texted me at various times throughout the day as she endured the long bus ride. Endured is exactly the word I would use. She hates traveling, and she hates sitting in confined spaces for long periods of time. She texted me any time she felt she needed support or distraction.

My third child would likely not have any contact with me whatsoever from the moment I dropped him off until the moment he had to climb back in my car for the drive home. When he left, I reminded him that he had his cell phone and charger, and one quick text at night would let me know that he was still alive and with his school group.

So tonight, I texted him: “Did you have a good day?”

His reply: “yes.” Did I mention that he is a kid of few words?

“Anything exciting happen?” I tried again.

“No.”

Okay then.

Tomorrow, I will ask him about food. That subject should get the attention of any teenage boy, shouldn’t it?

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*Image is a photo of word art at the Culinary Institute of America

Yesterday…

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Yesterday… I held my first child in my arms—all six pounds of him—as he wiggled his feet and studied my face, searching for recognition and committing my features to his brand new memory.

Yesterday, my first-born said good-bye to his childhood, adulthood dawning the next morning despite the fact that his birthday wouldn’t be official until late in the day.

Yesterday… I held my fingers out for two chubby hands to grasp, and I bent over to toddler level to “walk” him up and down, up and down, up and down the hall while he smiled his gleeful smile.

Yesterday, I stood on tippy toes to hug my son good-bye before school. The morning good-byes are now bittersweet, and I (at least) am holding on to each and every precious one.

Yesterday… I sat with my son at preschool because he didn’t want me to leave him behind. I sat in the classroom for several of the first few days, quietly watching, until he grew comfortable with the idea of me leaving.

Yesterday, my son walked out the door—too rushed for a decent breakfast—in his need to pick up his girlfriend and consult with this friend and that group adviser before the school day was underway.

Yesterday… my son spent hours at the kitchen table with paper, scissors, glue, stickers, ribbon, clay, etc. crafting some of the most impressive art projects seen in the past few decades. His eyes would be bright with ideas and possibilities as paper shards scattered across the floor where they would stay until the vacuum came through to gobble them up.

Yesterday, my son finished assembling the high school literary magazine. As with his projects of old, he was excited to watch it come together. To move from individual pieces of writing and artwork to a finished compilation, bound into a single, cohesive whole that will be distributed to the student body.

Yesterday… my son graduated from kindergarten. It was a warm, sunny day, and the room was sticky from little kid use. When the ceremony was over, we celebrated with ice cream sundaes, pictures with the teacher, and some playtime on the playground before we left the tiny “campus” to move on to a bigger school and a full day program.

Yesterday, my son’s graduation announcements arrived in the mail. The paper was stiff and fresh and official and embossed with the school seal and His. Full. Name. He promptly reported that his name was misspelled, compelling me look more closely. The glint in his eye and his sense of fun have not changed or faded over time.

Yesterday, when I was talking to my daughter about her brother’s birthday, I accidentally referenced it as his 13th birthday rather than his 18th birthday. Because in my mind, he will always be some combination of ages that is far less than his actual years. And because…

Time. It’s like that. It bends and warps and does crazy things to our brains, making us think that moments have stood still when years have passed.

Yesterday. So many yesterdays.

 

*Image is a photo taken yesterday by my talented daughter and used with her very gracious permission

Emotions

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I have always been the type of person to cry at things that I find particularly moving, movies mostly—happy, sad, it doesn’t matter. I will cry. When I was pregnant with my children, I was particularly prone to crying at any little thing. I figured it was the hormones.

This past weekend, I was driving my daughter to a sports competition two hours from home. She was in the seat beside me dozing off. Despite her presence in the passenger seat, essentially I was on this drive alone with my thoughts.

Spring has landed with full force here in New England, and the hills are fluffed with an intense range of spring greens—pale green, bright green, pinkish green, yellow green. Even some flowering trees are sprinkled in, as well. As I drove, I was struck by the beauty, and my heart was full; I started tearing up.

Wait, what? I am crying at the vibrant spring greenery on the hillsides? Who cries at that??

Admittedly, it is an emotional time. The previous night, my son went off to the prom, and we are preparing for high school graduation. The emotions that I feel are in some ways exactly what I expected, and in some ways so much more intense than I could have imagined. On any given day, I will cycle from nostalgic to proud mom to happy to sad. I will run through years’ worth of memories all the way through now and to the future.

For now, it seems, I am once again particularly prone to crying. Apparently, those times come and go. This bout will stick with me, at least through the next month. Perhaps, I will keep my sunglasses handy—a good way to hide my tearing eyes—and pray for lots of sunny days so I can wear them without question.

Then again, does anyone really care if I let my emotions show?

Editorial

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“I don’t know how to write an editorial,” W told me when I arrive home from work one day this week. “And I need to write one for language arts.”

I was rushing around to get dinner started before I had to run out again to pick up J from theater practice. “Why don’t you Google it, look at a couple examples, and I can help you when I get back from picking up your sister?” I acknowledged his statement, though I didn’t completely register what he was saying.

When I returned, he tried again. “I have to write an editorial from the point of view of a character in our book, and it has to be ‘historically accurate.’ Can you help me?”

“What do you need help with?” I asked.

“I don’t know how to write one.”

“Didn’t your teacher go over it in class? She must have given you some examples,” I queried, hoping he would think back to the class and remember what he was supposed to do.

“Not really. She never told us how to do it.”

“I’ll bet she did, but you shut off,” I stated, probably more bluntly than I should have.

“What?” he asked, unsure of my meaning.

“You shut off,” I repeated. “Your teacher was talking about it, and you decided it was information you would never need. So you shut off.” A smirk of recognition crept across his face.

“She never talked about it. She gave us newspapers, but she never said we’d need to know it.” Imagine that!

I stifled a groan, and I hoped he couldn’t hear my eyes rolling….

Surprise Memory

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I was cleaning a drawer today, on a crazed hunt to find matches for the socks that had become separated from their mates months ago. Sometimes, the matches reappear in a future batch of laundry, and the individual socks linger in the drawer, one buried and the other floating near the surface. Once in awhile, I am motivated enough by the mess that results from my daily “stirring” of the drawer’s contents that I take the time to sit and straighten things out.

This morning in my straightening, I came across a pair of socks that I put in the drawer for safe-keeping, a pair that I frequently forget I have saved. It is a pair of teeny tiny baby socks that I received before C was born, 18 or so years ago. Each time I come across them, they catch me by surprise. The socks are so tiny that it’s difficult to believe he actually wore them in his first months. But he did.

Each time I stumble across these socks, I am reminded how quickly time passes. I finger the soft material as I mentally measure the passage of time in the exponential growth of my children. I click through each of their stages, from infancy to now.

I see smiles and a hint of mischief in their eyes, feel the warmth of their tiny hands in mine, remember random moments like how each of them would lick soap off their hands when I washed them after supper. I can hear their little voices, their footsteps, their cries. The socks bring back images and memories of so many of the things that have happened in our lives: the funny things they said and did, the experiences we had, the life struggles we faced. All of these things we did together.

Each new rediscovery of these socks is a gift. I find the socks, Itake a walk down memory lane, and then I place them back in the drawer where I can find them again in a month, a year, or two. Perhaps when I discover these socks again in six months or a year, when C is off at college, the walk down memory lane will be even more bittersweet.

 

[Image is a photo of the socks in the hand of the child who once wore them.]

Yesteryear #atozchallenge

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This evening, I was looking through a closet to see if we had some black drawing paper. I didn’t think we actually had any, but since we have a number of art supplies acquired through a factory clearance sale, and I wasn’t exactly sure of our “inventory.”

As I looked, I came across a tattered pad of newsprint. It was an 18×24 pad, and I could picture my children much younger, lying on the floor drawing sprawling pictures. Nostalgic, I pulled out the pad, and flipped it open.

On the first page, there was a child’s drawing of an airport. Planes sat on runways. There was a plane on a flatbed trailer, and some maintenance vehicles. “What nerd drew that?” W asked, looking over my shoulder. He stepped in closer.

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I turned to the next drawing. Wind turbines, solar panels, and water wheels dotted the landscape of the large white page. I smiled at W. “There’s your answer.” Only W was constantly producing drawings that had to do with alternate energy sources, vehicles, geography, etc. And as we looked through the drawings, this pad held it all.

By the time we had flipped the last page, we were laughing at the spelling he had used in labeling various elements of the drawings, the complicated yet simplistic concepts, the lists of supplies necessary to build some of the things he had drawn, and the calculations—always in extraordinarily large numbers—he had completed.

At the same point, we realized we had stumbled upon something that C would later label “a keeper.” This pad of newsprint was truly a gift from yesteryear.

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Turning the Tables #atozchallenge

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Spring has brought warm weather here in New England, and we are beginning to open windows and leave our doors ajar to let the breezes bring fresh air into the house. In our kitchen, we have a deep windowsill, and during the winter, when the windows aren’t open, things tend to collect there. Often, these items are placed there, then forgotten.

The other night, as we sat down to dinner at the table, it was warm in the kitchen despite the open front door. I surveyed the windowsill, which was cluttered with things that had not been put in their proper places.

“W, you’re going to have to clean off the windowsill so we can start opening that window,” I said, knowing that most of the time, the stuff that lands there belongs to him.

He turned and looked at the sill, most likely mentally calculating the amount of work required to complete the task. “That’s not all mine,” he determined. “J puts it there when she cleans off the table for dinner.”

“Well,” I thought for a minute. “What about those lifesavers?” I had watched him take a couple each morning on his way out the door to the bus. “What are the lifesavers doing on the windowsill?”

“Those?” he asked, pointing to the opened bag and the white candies scattered over the pile of magazines and mail. He looked me straight in the eye. “Those aren’t mine.”

I tipped my head in question. “Yes they are. You have been eating them.”

“Yeah, but they’re not mine. They’re C’s.”

With the mention of his name, C snapped to attention. “Those lifesavers are not mine!” he exclaimed. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Yes they are,” W confirmed. “They’re the ones you took to Dad’s house.”

“Oh,” he suddenly appeared sheepish. “Is that where they went?” He looked more carefully at the windowsill.

“Those are the lifesavers you took to your father’s?” I asked.

“Yeah,” the two boys confirmed, simultaneously.

“I guess they’re mine then,” C shrugged.

“If those are the ones you took to your father’s, they’re mine,” I stated, deciding to claim them since the boys were still arguing over them. After all, I paid for them. Then again, by that standard, there wasn’t much in the house that didn’t belong to me.

“Okay, they’re yours then,” W said decisively. He paused for half a second, then turned to look at me, his eyes penetrating and his face comically stern. He took on my tone and inflection. “So Mom… what are the lifesavers doing on the windowsill?”

Wait… what?

Respite #atozchallenge

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I am taking a break from complaining—not that I complain a lot. However, I have come to the realization that the things I tend to complain about are things that I cannot—or at least not at this moment—change, for whatever reason. And so it is really not worth the time and energy to complain about them.

My son, on the other hand, has taken up complaining with a vengeance. We got in the car the other day, and someone on an NPR talk show used the word, “acrossed” which, of course, isn’t a word.

“I hate when people say ‘acrossed,’” he informed me. “That’s just wrong!”

“I know,” I agreed. “Me too.” I turned to back out of the parking space. Now, W was focused on the back of the car to our right.

“I can’t believe the dealer put their insignia on the car crooked. You’d think they could at least put it on there straight,” he commented. Silence ensued for a minute while he thought about his words, and then he said, “Apparently, I am just complaining tonight.”

We had only traveled a few feet when he said, “Can you believe how that person parked? Who would park like that?”

As we drove, he found myriad complaints—from the items in people’s yards to the cars passing us. And he jumped on everything I said. “Oh yuck!” I said, commenting on a particularly nasty roadkill as I quickly turned away.

“What?” he asked, suddenly looking at my side of the road rather than his.

“A squirrel,” I told him.

“Someone hit a squirrel? Who would do such a thing?” By this point, he was having difficulty keeping a straight face. “How rude!”

As we drove, he continued to complain about everything he could. A tree that was not growing straight; a person running on the side of the road; a shrink-wrapped boat that has not moved from the same yard in several years. Anything was fodder for his complaining, and by the time we reached our destination, I was laughing, and he had cracked a smile that he couldn’t extinguish.

Complaining seems to suit him for now, but I’m glad I’m taking a break. I just thought this break would be more… well… peaceful.