Wednesday, August 29, 2012

Fifteen.


Fifteen years we have journeyed through this life together, you and I. Six more, I realize, than I have been married to your step-father, and seven more than I was ever married to your dad. You and I have lived a long-haul together. By the time I see you off into adulthood, you will be almost as old as I was when I saw you enter the world.

For fifteen years, you have told me "No," beginning with kicks and arched-back howls, and progressing through to headlong dashes away from constraining hands. You have run onto rooftops forbidden you to climb and refused to like The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Still, you ask me what you should eat for breakfast and, when I make five suggestions, you smile at me.

"Ucky," you say.

Yesterday, you turned fifteen and you went to get an allergy shot after school. You returned home and sat down to complete Physics, English, History and French. By the time it was dinner, you still weren't done but came down to eat anyway. I had forgotten to ask you what you wanted and made an ordinary soup, which you didn't touch. We sang  "Happy birthday" to you in French and brought you a slice of left-over cake from your party.

"Do you have any homework left to do?," I asked.

"A chapter of Of Mice and Men and a bunch of questions. I don't want to do it," you said, quite reasonably. " I've been working for hours. And it's my birthday."

I said you had to, though, and off you went, without so much as a stomp of your foot. At 8 PM you emerged again, done, to find that I needed to go to bed soon, my tooth pain having gotten worse. By 9 PM, you were left downstairs with your step-dad and a go-ahead to watch Myth Busters on the couch. Happy birthday.

I don't worry about you anymore. Watching you stand among your friends, you look like a healthy tree–like something solid, something that the wind won't knock down. You aren't a sapling anymore, whipped here and there by gales, its trunk about to snap. The world pours on hours of homework and you do them. The world gives you raised, aching, itching allergy shot bumps for your birthday and you say, "Well, OK." You are growing up.

Because you have said "No" to me so many times, for so many years, so much more than my other children, perhaps there is not so much left to push against anymore. You have already built yourself a self. You don't have to spend your teenage years kicking at me with steel-toed boots to get the freedom you have been winning, day by day, since you were born. You are your own man, a young man influenced by his mother, a growing man who knows his own mind.

23 comments:

  1. Wonderful! Every time I read something you've written about your children, I come away with the best feeling about your house. The thing that always stands right up there with how much you love them is how you love them. You see them, who they are--and not just some creation or extension of you or your vision of who you always knew they would be--and you honor and celebrate that. You honor and celebrate them. That's as good as it gets.

    Oh, and happy birthday to Fifteen. He sounds pretty wonderful, too.

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    2. Thank you, Beth. That's the highest compliment you could pay me as a mother. My tribute to my eldest is that I credit him with the mother that I am. Due to his total abnegation of my agenda, I was altered into a person fit to raise another human being. Without him, I think I'd still be that little girl, all grown up now but still dressing up cats in dresses. This one scratched me HARD and I learned that he wasn't going to wear a dress. I have been blessed to spend the subsequent years of my parenting enjoying the unfolding of the human beings with whom I am privileged to travel alongside and have learned something of how to influence rather than force. No is sometimes the best thing you can tell someone who wants to make you who you're not.

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  2. This leaves me speechless. Just beautiful. This is the center of where it all is, no? What a good mama you are and what a great son. Happy birthday (belated) to him and happy 15th anniversary of mothering to you.

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    1. It's funny. I was sort of a lame mother yesterday, in all the usual senses. I didn't make him a special breakfast, I didn't ask what he wanted for dinner, I didn't let him off the hook for his chores. And maybe I should have. I was, to tell the truth, focused on getting through my day with what was on my plate, not feeling very well. And periodically it would occur to me, But it's his BIRTHDAY! and then the thought would pass and be replaced by the next logistical concern.

      I felt bad, and then I looked at him and he was so OK. I thought, in so many ways, he is one of us now, one of the grown-ups, all of us bustling about our business, doing our little jobs and forgetting to want a pony and a circus tent once a year on the occasion of our birth. I just looked at him and I saw a young man that I have raised, am raising, and I was so proud.

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    2. Erm. I still want a pony and a circus tent once a year on the occasion of my birth.
      To look at one's progeny and be able to honestly say "They're OK, in so many ways..." that is a blessing.

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  3. (:
    Sounds like you've done a wonderful job with him...
    Please wish him a happy (belated) birthday to him for me, Tara.

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    1. He's made of iron, that one. I don't know if I can take credit. But thank you all the same.

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  4. Made me cry again !
    Raising childeren is different than raising human beings

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    1. So true. And I think that focusing on the latter has saved me from insanity. I don't know if I know how to raise kids. I think I don't. But I am delighted to participate in the raising of human beings, an exercise based on mutuality and struggling as we go, like a marriage where only one of us can drive or teach the other how to read. Or like a friendship where one friend has to tell the other friend occasionally to go to their room.

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  5. How beautiful! My own son has matured so much in the last year or two (he will be seventeen soon) and it just amazes me how fast they grow up in the last bit of precious time we have them.

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    1. I know! It's like lightning! The development of wit, of wordliness, of common sense and what look like real friendship skills just in the last three months has bowled me over. It's not linear, this growth. It comes in giant fits and starts and some day they are just an adult, in some mathematically impossible way. I am absolutely astounded.

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  6. very beautiful homage to Rowan.

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  7. You're so lucky to have been able to raise a son who developed in all the right ways! Do you think, if he reads this post and these comments, he'll be embarrassed silly? :=)

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    1. He'd probably be annoyed. Usually, I ask him, but this time I just wrote about him without his permission. :) I figure he'll survive.

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  8. How beautiful, I can only hope I look back on these years of constant 'No' replies with the same pride. It takes a special mother to be able to let their child build themselves a self, hats off to you.

    Happy birthday wishes to your son!

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    1. Thanks. This one left me no choice, and I'm awfully glad he didn't. To a large extent, he's done a fabulous job of growing himself up, and bringing me along the way.

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  9. THIS CHILD IS GORGEOUS..Tom Sawyer look indeed..and mom YOU SHOULD BE PROUD..what a gorgeous precious boy! :0).....FAMILY!

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    1. He is quite a stunning child. He's got that slightly in-between look at the moment, with a speckling of acne, but he manages to be beautiful all the same. He's changed A LOT over the last year, lost that child look. Soon he will be nothing but hard angles and testosterone.

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  10. Absolutely beautiful.

    Happy birthday to him!

    He, by the way, looks just like you.

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  11. This, of course, is gorgeous. Happy birthday!

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  12. My very youngest turned 18 this summer, and my very oldest 24. I can identify with so much here. I love what was said in the comments about raising human beings rather than children.

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Faith in Ambiguity by Tara Adams is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License