All Grown Up

 

 

I was reading a blog the other day about a young woman who'd had a troublesome day with her two-year-old.  She linked to another blog with another woman who'd had a troublesome day with her little boy as well.  I was amused and went to the comments section to leave an encouraging word, but many others had been there before me.  Most all of them had small children and they told of their bad days.  I read.  I laughed.  I commiserated.  I am a mom.  I know.

Amie was a good baby, except for her desire to stay up ALL NIGHT LONG.  She did not sleep a full night through until she was eight years old.  She truly was a good child, with only two 'bad day' memories for me.

There was the first day. She was two at the time.  On that day, she locked me out of the car I'd just put her into.  Thankfully on a cool autumn day.  When I finally convinced her to unlock the door it was because she had to go potty.  And so, did I.  While I was in the bathroom, she pulled my purse from the place I'd tucked it when we'd gone back into the house, got my house keys and lost them.  Forever.  Never to be found.  Conscious that we had to run our errand to a distant city, I prayed over the unlocked door, pulled it shut behind me and asked the Good Lord to watch over our household.

We drove to a city some 50 miles away to a big bank downtown.  We rode the elevator up to the fourth floor.  Amie was fascinated.  Push a button and up we go!  I promised her we'd take another ride shortly and handed my paperwork to a secretary on the floor who indicated a bench against the wall next to the elevator and told us to please wait...So we sat down, and Amie amused herself trying to push the button to make the machine open up for another ride.  Only she couldn't quite reach it.  She used the handy little red bar on the wall right next to the button to pull herself up, the one marked FIRE. 


Do you know how quickly a four-story bank can spew customers and employees onto pavement?  Or how quickly the city fire trucks responded? I hid out around the corner with a very red face while the secretary, who was much amused, brought firemen, bosses and fellow employees around the corner to look at the little girl who'd done all this and kept saying "And this is her mother!"  I felt shattered that day when I finally returned home.

The second bad day was the day she turned 14 and left my house to move in with her father.  It wasn't a good choice, and I knew it, but he was her father.  For two years I barely saw her, though she lived but three miles away.   I wrote and called, and I asked friends about her.  It was a rough three years for me.  As it turned out for her, too.  One day she came home, and she didn't leave again until she was 20.

She went back to that big city then and found a job and an apartment.  Somehow, she ended up homeless, but she didn't let me know it.   Her manager pulled up her job application and called me to let me know Amie was living out of her car.  She told me she was asking Amie to move in with her and asked if I'd be all right with that. She was a mom.  She understood.  So Amie moved in with her and eventually met the man she's been partners with for the past 25 years.

But Amie's all grown up now...

Samuel was quite a handful.  He was a regular Houdini at six months and could wiggle, squirm and unfasten any type of restraint on car seat, shopping buggy, stroller, etc.  At nine months I found him sitting atop the upright piano in the living room.  A week later it was the top of the refrigerator in the kitchen.  A very poor kitchen that didn't have even a counter next to the fridge, so how he managed to get to the top was a total mystery.   One day when he went missing, I looked high and low.  I found him locked in the trunk of my car.  How he got there is a question I've yet to find an answer to, but somehow, he did it.   I was told time and again I needed to talk to the doctor, "and see if there isn't a pill to calm him down," by well-meaning friends and relatives.

At 18 months he ran away from home with a fat puppy under one arm and a kitten under the other.  He walked through an acquaintance's screen door 3 blocks away.  I mean, he literally walked right through her screen door, without bothering to open it. Just pushed through the screen and walked into their home.  At 19 months he was off again.  The neighbors were out with me looking hard for him.  Someone had just mentioned calling the police to help when I happened to glance down the street.  There stood a woman with my blonde-haired little boy in her arms, at least a good two blocks away.

When I got to her, she told she'd looked out her kitchen window into her backyard and saw a toddler sitting on the end of her diving board.  Her yard had a six-foot-high wooden fence around it that was locked shut.   "I about had a heart attack," she told me.  Me too.  By the time he was 2 every neighbor within hearing distance opened their door and started looking for him if I called his name more than twice.

At two he was running around an empty community pool that volunteers were cleaning and fell into the empty deep end.  The smack of his head on the pavement made us all sick to our stomachs.  We rushed him to the hospital where he was pronounced as being just fine.  He had a goose egg the size of, well a goose egg, and two days later he had black eyes, but he never showed any other sign or symptom of injury.

At three, Samuel convinced the next-door neighbor boy to remove his training wheels from his tiny bike.  When said neighbor boy came running indoors to tell me that Samuel was riding off up the street, I was out the door just in time to watch him fly over the handlebars and bust his head open on the pavement. 

At four, he walked innocently enough into the house one warm Spring afternoon and sat down to watch tv.  Moments later a raving lunatic of an elderly woman came right on in without knocking and proceeded to upbraid him.  When I came out of the kitchen in a hurry to see what the commotion was all about, I found her standing in front of him holding a handful of what appeared to be wilted weeds...which were in fact the remains of the morning's planting of tomatoes and eggplants.  

And here I'd thought she truly was a lunatic, but no, she was just mad as a wet hen and who could blame her with the morning's work in her hands instead of in the ground where she'd left it?  Those are just a few days to recall.  We won't talk about the other hair raising, dare devil, out and out bad boy stunts he pulled before he turned into a teen.

He kept up his bad boy tactics until he was 15 and got into some real trouble.  Then suddenly he changed.  He became a really good kid, one to be proud of.  So good in fact, that he earned merits from everyone he met.   They'd tell us all the time what a great kid he was, and we'd smile, because he had become a good kid.  No one could see the scars we bore from his bad days.

One day when he was 23, a good friend laughed out loud when he told her, "It was a good day the days Mama didn't cry.  I made Mama cry most every day."  She thought he was kidding, but he wasn't.  I did cry nearly every day over that boy.

But he grew up.

Then JD came into my life.  At 15 he was mostly grown, but he'd been through a tough time and was emotionally hurt.  I worried over him while he insisted on living in a dark room and did nothing but lie abed for nearly a full year, and then he began to act more teen-like and learned to drive.  

Then I lay awake nights worrying lest he was hurt when he should have been home from work two or three hours before.  He joined the Navy, and I worried still more because that son of mine was not a correspondent.  One day his little sister said to me, "Mama stop worrying.  He's in the Navy. If he dies, they'll let you know."  It wasn't much comfort...but he stayed alive.  He too grew up.

And then there was Katie.  Katie came to the world with a lot to say and she started saying it the moment they put her in my arms.  She cooed and oohed and ahhed and chattered away non-stop from the day of her birth and for nearly 18 years after.  She was smart and more grown-up than the two I'd raised from scratch, no doubt due to having three older kids around.  She saw no reason why she should be different from them.  Katie got a lot of attention and a lot of spoiling from those older kids, and she soaked it up.

At four, she read the street signs and billboards out loud to me every day on our commute to her nursery school and my job.  She could remember whole commercials and her favorite scenes from movies and quoted them word for word.  At five, when asked what she'd like to be when she grew up my youngest replied quickly, "The boss.  'Cause right now there are too many people telling me what to do."  She needed lots of attention this one and demanded it if it wasn't given.  She took justly earned punishments without a tear and roared loudly over unjust.  By the time she was 11 she was telling me the punishments she felt she deserved for rule infractions, and she was usually pretty well on the mark, too.

Most of Katie's reports from school were good ones, but one continual complaint came from every single teacher: "She talks too much."  It got so that we'd introduce ourselves to her teachers, "Hi we're the Cheneys, Katie's parents.  And yes, we know, she talks too much but besides that how is she doing in your class?" Katie decided in middle school to make a change.  "Don't tell the teachers I talk too much.  I want a chance to turn over a new leaf."  And she did try. I can't say we had much trouble out of her other than the standard complaints of a parent of teens.

She had a pretty rotten summer the year before her senior year in high school.  She made a thoughtless teen-aged sort of decision and gave us a good scare one night, but the moment she realized things were not going well she called us right up, told us what was happening and how to get to her.  And then she got ill and stayed ill for months on end with a severe case of mono.  She barely managed to get through senior year she was ill so often, but she pushed hard and kept her grades high and rested every single second she could, sometimes sleeping right there in the classroom.  We worried a lot that year. 

But she grew up.

I spent a lot of time in prayer over those children when they were growing.  If you're the mother of a two-year old, you'd think, "Well they all grew up, so your worries have ended."  You'd be wrong.  Now they are all grown up, I've gone to my knees nightly on their behalf.   Their hurts hurt me, and their worries concern me, and my heart is forever tied up with theirs.  There's seldom a week goes by that one of my grown-up children isn't hurt or wrestling with life over hard choices that must be made or have retreated into silence.

The bad days they had as children were nothing to the things that concern them now.  It's so easy to smooth over a raspberry on a scraped knee or to encourage rest when they have a bad cold.  It's easy enough to put them to bed early as a punishment when they are small because you have simply had ENOUGH and must have a break from parenting a two-three- or four-year-old, but it's a lot harder when they suffer their first heartbreak, and you must find the right words to encourage and heal and mend.  It's hard when they call you weeping because the doctor's diagnosis is bad, the marriage is broken, the job is lost, a child is lost.   All you can offer is to pray for them and with them.

Do you know why we have these 'bad days' when they are little?  To build our strength, to build up the strength reserves of prayer they're going to need from us to see them through later in life.

 They're all grown up now, you see.