I have only one-real teen-the other two close behind.
My optimism is real too-but it gets foggy sometimes and
less than rose colored
There are days that he breaks my heart. That this stage
of life breaks my heart.
I can go to bed feeling joyous and other nights cry
myself to sleep
He still has the power over me just as he did when he was
a little baby-to make or break my day
Only thing is I used to be able to control him and
somehow make him listen to me. Now I do not.
Sometimes it is in his dismissive tone
Sometimes it is in the lack of what he used to say
Sometimes it is just plain and simple a swear word that
rolls off of his tongue as easily as “hello or thank-you” Mom this tastes like
shit.
It’s often as though there is a bomb ticking besides me. What
will set him off next?
Or a kitchen timer about to buzz in about a year or so
putting an end to all the family cottage time we now spend together and
treasure
It’s in the way he will look at his Dad’s Corona beer and
casually say”Corona sucks”
Or in the way he makes it clear at dinner how he wants to
back in the city with his buddies. Since camp everynight. The boy who loves
cottage vacation and loves us..now wants to go home? And has no shame in
telling us this?
Excuse
my language but what the fuck happened
to our life?
It feels is all so sudden. Hardly any warning..or was
there?
It feels like the difference between being married 8 yrs…17
yrs…25 yrs…. All so very very different
15.yrs 7 months….I think he has turned into a real
teenager. Like 25 yrs of marriage I will probably look back and say “gosh no….there
is a lot worse to come!”
It’s the loud music. The long showers. The autonomy
needed.
That it is not every single night now that he needs to
say I love you a thousand times (often just a hundred)
It’s in the way he speak of girls. And mostly of the way
he does not speak of them to us.
It’s the way he is more judgmental and critical of
everything we do
It’s in the way he craves technology like oxygen
sometimes
It’s in the way they tend to gang up on us..I can hear
their conversations in the basement when they don’t’ know I am listening…..”another
12 days with them..without our friends..lets just make the best of it ok!!!”
It
made me cry myself to sleep last night
In between a hell of a lot of happy moments
I thought ahead to next summer…and then the next. I am scared
of the changes that lie ahead.
I look at the hair under his arms and beginning above this
his lip and I wonder how this young thing (me) could have possibly grown the
beginnings of a man?
And despite all of this crap and anxiety this causes…I
desperately love him. Head over heels. Which makes being dismissed and disrespected
that much tougher.
Because the good sides of him are GREAT.
I watched him today drive the boat . Not drive it with
his Dad..or under our supervision. Drive it to do an errand on the far and
other side of the lake and park it at the marina. He was made to drive boats.
And then drive the Jet Ski we rented and driv his
siblings around and expertly park and teach them each how. Even though he just
learned in the 5 minute lesson himself
I watch him waterski and be one with the waves and water
I smell the Ax scent of him as he comes out of the shower
and shakes his long hair off to dry on me
I look at him across the table and picture the beers and
the parties about to happen. In a heartbeat. Tangled in the next while in the
comfort of a young girls arms
I look at his tanned skin and his long wild air and clear
green eyes and can’t even imagine the man he will be..so sure of himself..so
confident..so stylish
I watch him and he figures himself out and the world
around him. While he figures out his place in it.
I take his hugs and his kisses as they come and lean my
head on his shoulder now that he is an inch taller than me and feel actually almost
small in comparison.
I watch as he still goes to bed with Coco. His stuffy
from when he was 6 months old
I look at him in awe most of the time. That this
boy,..almost man is mine.
And that is where the optimism comes in. Where I feel
less annoyed and less scared than I probably could be.
Because the pride and awe always outweigh it. Looking at
a life that you have grown and taught and sheltered and loved-become his own.
Become whom he was meant to be.
You are no longer part of his process. You try to be and
you sneak your way in there often and sometimes-but his process is his own now
I would not make him cut off his long hair if your threatened
and tortured me.
I love watching who he is becoming. Who he wants to me.
But the dissing and dismissing and disrespect takes a
toll. Somehow he manages to always make it up..make it all right. He learns
many of his boundaries through me still.
I watch as he rides the boat, the jet ski, the car and I
wonder what there is left to do for this child?
Is there a child left in there?
Why is he not running into my arms when I gather him at
camp?
Why does he want to go home when everyone he loves is
right here at the cottage?
Are
we all here?
Has he fallen in love?
Does he have secrets?
How does he know that he thinks Cornea sucks?
How does he even know how to drive a jet ski?
I cry myself to sleep often and I feel the earth shift beneath
me..beneath us…beneath all the routine and structure and comfort we have now.
And then I remember being 17 and going to the ocean with
my mom for 2 weeks. And not even once going to look at the ocean with her.
Staying by the pool. With all the cute boys. She was by herself at the ocean-I
guess for 2 weeks while I hung out at the pool.
Together.
Yet Separated.
I hope I have taught him well enough. Them all well
enough. That like me…thay will know when it is time to make their way back.
Back to the ocean, the waves and the water.
Back to me.
