The Haircut

The haircut. 

It came up again tonight at the dinner table. 

Nothing can make my eyes sting and shut down my ability to speak like the thought of it.

Ironic, because I wanted it to be cut so many times before now. 

But not now.

When that hair is cut, I will see the man we are sending off to bootcamp. Our Marine. Off he will go after he graduates high school. Less than two months from now.

The long-haired boy that lives in our home will leave with short hair. He will be a visitor in our home from then on.

I could feign surprise, but I've known it was coming. 

He handed me something when he was 12-years-old. "Here, you're going to need this." 

A Proud-parent-of-a-Marine sticker. I tried to explain all of the other options and he just looked at me with pity. 

He was only 12, but it was already years in the making. If there was an opportunity to dress up, he already knew what he would be wearing. I think he is 9 here...

As his mother, I can only support his decision, and try to soak up the early mornings and late nights -  when he is still of a mind to eat breakfast with his Mom, lay on my lap, and be tickled like the little boy he once was. I have countless pictures of these times, lest I forget...

When he was two-years-old, I came home from work to a little boy who had a haircut by his well-meaning Daddy. Little blond curls off and short hair on. 

I cried. It was a terrible surprise. I still have those locks in a ziplock baggie somewhere. Not sure if that is sentimental or just gross at this point. Probably both.

But I learned something. Surprise haircuts are bad (for me). 

Another haircut is coming and I have to face it head on. Probably need to watch it happen. And cry. 

But whenever it is, I hope not to be surprised. 

It occurs to me that I have never dreaded something for so long. I'm pretty sure that makes me one of the lucky ones. There are a lot worse things than haircuts, of course. 

God bless all who serve, their mothers, their fathers, their barbers, and all who love them. 

A Gentle Disintegration

Yesterday, we took our first daytrip to the beach without all of the boys.  The oldest was working. Today, the middle one drove solo for the first time.  He got his driver’s license on Friday.  He’s the really busy one and his busyness always necessitated a ride in the middle of my free time.  So, we celebrate this new freedom right along with him, rather than validate the pit in our stomach provoked by the thought that “this is really happening.”    

As a wise friend’s wise mother used to say, “Only sick birds don’t leave the nest.”

So, I don’t ask for time to stop or slow down because it is all well, and happening as it should.  I’ve mentioned it before, but my friend calls the years your children are home, before anyone can drive, the “sweet spot”.  Everybody is home, safe and secure under a loving and watchful eye.  My sweet spot is disintegrating, but I am grateful that it has been slow and gentle.  Measured in days and years, not seconds and minutes.  

These past two weeks, many young people have lost their lives to murdering madmen.  I get lost in trying to accompany their parents in their grief.  I don’t know any of them, but I obsess, pray, and force myself into the present.  And repeat.  I see social media posts of people continuing to smile and live their lives like nothing has happened.  I am amazed at this, at first.  And then I join them, because I need the distraction.  It is refreshing to see and share the good, as well as the bad, I reason.  Like some weird balance in this land of unrelated-but-loosely-connected people.

Though social media wasn’t born, yet, Dr. Haim Ginott in “Between Parent and Teenager” describes the benefit of these loose connections, well. “Many teenagers are tormented by terrors they think private and personal.  They do not know that their anxieties and doubts are universal.  This insight is hard to convey.  Each teenager must attain it on their own.  It takes time and wisdom to realize that the personal parallels the universal, and what pains one man pains mankind.”

We have so much to learn from one another.

I sat with her again on Friday.  She was asleep at the dining room table and came to with a touch on the shoulder and mention of her name.  We flipped through her book, looking at the pictures.  She didn’t remember writing it, seem to recognize her name on the cover, nor think it odd that if someone else wrote it, they sure included a lot of pictures of her family.  

I was grateful again that she has given us so much to talk about in these pages of hers.  Laugh-out-loud moments with her children, layers of loss, years of sacrifice, and joys beyond all telling.  If we didn’t have them, I fear the shallowness of what would remain in their absence.

It is my ability to share her story with her (because she had written it down for herself), that I do the same.

One day, I may be dependent upon a stranger who visits frequently to tell me again who she is and what is this, again?  Hopefully, hearing the stories will pluck the strings in my soul, releasing all of the chords to my favorite song.  I will remember how we all “survived being alive”, and marvel at how whole and integrated I feel after a long life of unhurried and gentle disintegration, and a visit from a stranger.

The Intersection of 16 and 43

It’s Sunday.  This morning over eggs and bacon, I informed the family I’d be going on a long walk, as I often do.  Did anyone want to go?  They normally don’t.  No. No. No. My husband would out of kindness or duty, but honesty would keep him home, too.  I do appreciate the gesture, though.

I haven’t left the table, but an acute awareness of the difference between my children’s childhoods and my own has joined us there.  I have a poor memory, but can’t remember receiving or declining any invitation, ever - to hang out with my parents, go to the lake, or anything that would have gotten a quality timer out of the house to spend quality time with a parent or anyone, really.  

I mention my observation, and they mention theirs.  Like I’m a girl, and of course I didn’t walk with my Mom, because my Mom can’t walk.  

It’s a fair attempt at humor because they know that wasn’t always the case.  But, it is true.  They have never known my Mom as a person who could walk.

I can’t help but realize, again, that my oldest son is 16-years-old.  The same age I was when my Mom had a car accident that left her paralyzed from the chest down.  The same age I became a nurse, caregiver, grocery shopper, meal preparer/food-picker-upper, and a grown-up.  My brother was between the ages my other sons are now, and he could say the same.

But now, I actually am a grown-up.  I am 43-years-old.  The same age my mother was when she had the accident that claimed her mobility.

Sitting across the table from one another at these ages feels significant.  A little like a bell ringing from the outside in.  Like being at an intersection with the same street names in a different city.  Like a breathing time machine, as I heard in a song while making breakfast.

I left for my walk in a new and unexpected headspace.  I paused at my normal turn around spot to jot a few things down, and didn’t turn around there at all.   

I kept walking, thinking about all of the Prom pictures flooding my Facebook feed and remembering my own.  I marvel at the beauty of the girls, their dresses, the backdrops, and Moms with cameras.

I wore a handmade dress, lovingly made by my stepmom with red shoes to match.  I took pictures at the end of a hallway and in a living room, before and after the one hour drive to visit my Mom who was still in the Rehabilitation Hospital, so she could see us in all of our glory.  No one had cameras there.

It would be another month before she would come home in her wheelchair and enter our house using the ramp the Knights of Columbus built while she was away.  

Twenty-seven years have passed.  My Mom still battles with her body to stay well and a 16-year-old still wants to make sure his brothers did their share of the dishes, to make sure that everything is fair.  Ha.

The 16-year-old daughter of that 43-year-old mother is now a 43-year-old mother with a 16-year-old son.  She is grateful for and amazed by it all, but most especially by breakfast conversation that can create a time warp and at how you can walk six miles and never leave an intersection. 

Road Trip

We are on the road to Kansas to visit family.  We haven’t made his trip in a year.  Not together, anyway.  Normally, we would have been twice since the last time - Fourth of July and Thanksgiving.  But, COVID... and fear that gathering could kill our most vulnerable.  So, please don’t come home in July.  Or September.  Or November.

Vaccinations have been had and a year is well, way too long.  

So, here we are. On I-35.  Party of five.  A party of five, which now consists of four legal drivers (with parents in the car) and a baby who turns twelve tomorrow.  A new permit and an old permit-almost-license, as soon as the driving test is knocked out, because why would you be able to do it the same day as the written portion?

Time is picking up speed.  Even literally.  Today is the first day of Daylight Savings Time.  “Spring Forward’.  Yep, that’s what we’re doin’.  The clocks still say the old time, but we know the truth.  

These trips are going to be harder to come by.  We’re in the “sweet spot”, as a dear friend with a bigger and older family than mine likes to remind me.  Drivers and employees have more responsibilities and no paid time off.  Boys become men (like they should), and their Mom trades in her minivan for a truck because she was never the minivan type, anyway.  

I don’t know where they are going or what they will be, but I do know they won’t be home or all sprawled out in this minivan, like they are Right Now.  

Say cheese.

Becoming Secondary

Sometimes, there is a downside to working in hospice and it is different than what you might think.  It's not too much death or dying, but a hyper-awareness of time in my normal every-day living.

Nothing brings this home more than when I'm trying to track down my percussionist in the orbit of high school marching band when I can't get him on the phone.

Does that seem like a weird set of circumstances to bring the old sand-filled hourglass center stage?

I'm hoping I can explain, and figure it out for myself at the same time...

I get to meet people in the evening of life on a routine basis.  Very often, they've become secondary to the people in their lives for whom they were primary for a good long while.  Spouses and kids, mostly.  They were wives and husbands, mothers and fathers, and their best years were the same years I'm living now.  But, their people slowly moved on.  They were moved from the center of their lives to the periphery, and became someone to check in on, rather than someone to be included and enjoyed.

My eyes are wide open to this shift.  I'm becoming aware of the people in my life who may feel like they've been dropped in a secondary slot, permanently.  I am still primary for my children because I can drive and grocery shop and facilitate everything that is important to them.  But, I am inching my way to the periphery and every time I'm holding my phone and there is no answer on the other end, I know.

An unscheduled weekend rolls in and feels like a blessing and a curse because time together is so important.  But, finding more than two people who want to do the same thing is a chore and getting all five to agree is nearly impossible.

So, we compromise. 

At the river, a couple of us fished down the bank a little ways, I sat on an uncomfortable rock until my butt hurt and then filled a trash bag with other people's trash, while someone else threw rocks at spiders the size of grapefruits, hoping to pass a few minutes while noting, "this is the-most-redneck-vacation."  It seemed like the best bonding moment was our unanimous relief to be back home, savoring the memory that we created.  Mainly, that we didn't want to go back there any time soon.  No discussion needed.
 
Sunday kept us altogether for breakfast and Mass, but separate for the rest due to attractions that couldn't be resisted and commitments that needed to be kept.  But, fortunately for me, my plans included sitting poolside and holding a baby for a couple of hours which seemed to slow time a bit.  Gratefully.

Unless I am hitting Sonic at Happy Hour, there are few things my boys are interested in joining me for, and doing things as a family is, well, usually a compromise for most of us.  So, I sit on the futon as long as anyone will sit by me, deliver pigs in a blanket to a fort in the woods, change my schedule to steal a lunch date at Subway, and go to the skate park when it's almost dark because "they have lights, you know".

I know I am becoming secondary.  Just in little moments for now, but they are coming more frequently and I know they will keep coming, as they should.  Occasionally, someone will notice a little tear and recognize that I'm not okay and while I'm trying to find the words to explain, they decide they didn't really want an explanation, anyway.  And I'm relieved, because I couldn't really explain it, anyway.

My Trampoline Burn

I got a trampoline burn today.  This is worth noticing because you have to be on a trampoline to get a trampoline burn, and well, it's been quite a long time.  I probably would have declined the invitation to jump, as I have so many times before, but over the last couple of days, I've been wading through old photographs and videos.  Man, the videos!  We were all gathered around our tiny laptop computer in awe of days gone by.  The little bodies, the voices, the quirks, the enthusiasm, the batman masks, and spiderman costumes year round.  The kiddie pool turned gravel pit, the hours playing in the sprinkler with light sabers, cushions on the floor and jumping on the couch. 

We have lived in the same house for most of my sons' lives.  We're all the same people, but we're not.  What is more is we don't really even remember those people.  Something happened to time overnight.  We have lived so many moments up 'til now.  Some that have turned into memories jogged with a picture or video, and many more that won't.  But, they all count because they've brought us here and built what we have, although we could never fully explain or describe exactly how that happened because we've forgotten most of it.

Like this morning.  I woke up, had a cup of coffee, and made "apple biscuits" for breakfast.  The boys were thrilled, since I seldom make them and didn't tell them I was.  I got to enjoy each one coming in, figuring it out for themselves, and being the recipient of their spontaneous hugs of gratitude. 

It's sort of hard to believe I will forget these simple moments of joy, but sort of not.  They are surrounded by so many others just like them.  I read once that "there is no treaure in a pile", but in this case, it is a pile of treasure.  The word "gratitude" seems so paltry. 

Living life forward is such a gift.  It may seem like the only way to live, since it is the only way time seems to travel in real life.  But, as for so many, a time will come when the best part of our lives will be reflecting on, revisiting, and enjoying the memories we're making now. 

One day (hopefully 50 years from now), a hospice social worker is going to come to my home and write a narrative.  In a couple of paragraphs, you will know who I've loved, who I've lost, what is/was important to me in my life, and who is responsible for me now.  The remaining details of my life will be in the hearts of those I've loved, and nowhere else.  Apple biscuits and all the rest...     

So, yes, I will jump on the trampoline with you, while I still can.  And I will treasure the trampoline burn, until we all forget it ever happened.