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There She Goes

There She Goes

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Our youngest daughter got her driver’s license a couple of days ago. It was the goal of her summer and she reached it right before school starts tomorrow. I snapped some pictures of her first solo drive, as I did (I think) of her sisters when they took the wheel by themselves.

Though it’s not easy to instruct, to ride shotgun, clamping down on that imaginary brake, grabbing the seat cushions on the sly, so your child doesn’t know how terrified you actually are — how much harder it is to let her drive off on her own, into noise and weather and traffic and tricky left turns that she, and only she, will have to navigate.

It is a measure of trust, one of many we give our children as they grow. We believe in them, of course we do. But that doesn’t make it any easier.

Safe Haven

Safe Haven

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For many years now we’ve had more than one teenager in our family. Today, as Claire celebrates her 20th birthday, we only have one.

I’ve been thinking a lot about adolescence lately, its pains and its challenges mostly, its crabwise path — often sideways rather than straight up or down. The circuitous road to freedom and responsibility.

I’ve read enough history to know that Western adolescence is a relatively new creation. Kids used to grow up a lot faster behind a plow or on a factory floor. A common metaphor for young adulthood now, of course, is a launching pad. A place where our young ones perch lightly on their way out of the nest.

Look closely at this photo and you’ll see the egret on the deer’s back. An unlikely pair — as unlikely perhaps as middle-aged parents and their teenage offspring. But the deer offers her back as solace, as resting place, as safe haven. Stay here a bit until you’re ready to fly farther. You know you’re safe here. We have your back — and you have ours.

Stop-Time

Stop-Time

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It was not the night I would have chosen to watch home movies of the girls. But Suzanne is here, and she is in a cataloging state of mind. So I found an excuse to go downstairs, to walk by the TV, and once I started watching I couldn’t stop. For there they were again — our grown-up girls as babies and toddlers, dancing and playing and learning to walk.

Here you are, you three, I wanted to say. Where have you been hiding? This is the way you’re supposed to be, giggling and singing and stirring soap suds in the sink. It’s not time for you to graduate from college, to drive to the beach, to have your first job.

It was all I could do to sit still and watch their chubby arms reaching out as they took their first steps into the world. I want to be there all over again for them, be there in a way that was so much easier than the way I must be there for them now.

Lonely Soldiers

Lonely Soldiers

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Last night we saw my brother off to a faraway post, where his (civilian) job is taking him for a few months. The international terminal was quiet; soldiers dressed in camouflage gear sat alone at the bar, flipped through magazines at the newsstand, called home one last time before boarding their flights.

We sat with Drew, chatted, had a beer. Before long it was time for him to pass through security and check into his flight. I waved until I couldn’t see him anymore; I watched as as he squared his shoulders and moved his tall frame toward the future.

I was struck by how alone Drew and all of the camo-clad seemed. Where they are going only they can go. What they are doing only they can do.

It’s a scene that plays out here every day of the week without fanfare, a scene I never think about but on which our easy lives are based. The timeless march of soldiers heading off to war.

On Mother’s Day

On Mother’s Day

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Weeding, digging, mixing clay soil with peat moss and sand, preparing the ground for growth — for many years I have planted annuals on Mother’s Day. It is a chore that takes me, if only for an hour or two, into another world. The part I like the most, of course, is the end point of all the preparation — spading the newly friable soil and tucking the begonia or impatiens plants into it.

The timing of this task does not escape me. Every time I do it, yesterday for instance, I think of the metaphorical aspect of this Mother’s Day chore, of planting the tender-rooted flowers, of launching them into what I hope is a season of profusion. The teenage years have changed the way I think about this metaphor. I worry more about the hazards, the hard-packed clay, the weeds that choke, the rain that doesn’t fall, the deer who breakfast on my garden.

And yet, I still plant.

A Creek

A Creek

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The ground is saturated. Rain water trickles through the soil and into drainage ditches that divide the meadow. Yesterday I spotted a young boy squatting down beside one of those ditches. His bike laid carelessly on its side, as if he couldn’t wait to plunge into the water, to see what he might find there.

I remembered the park a street behind us when I was this boy’s age. There was a creek that wound around the park, and the playground smelled of fresh mud. I imagine the creek flooded in the spring of the year. But I wouldn’t have noticed that at the time.

All I knew then was the smell of the run in the dank days of spring, standing on the bank, immersed as this boy was immersed, catching crawdads or, later, bottling creek water to look at under my microscope. Every day had the same catch in its breath as these days do.

Caught on Tape

Caught on Tape

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News of the earthquake in Japan and the tsunami racing across the Pacific Ocean makes it hard to think of much else this morning. But a Washington Post review of the movie “The Kids Grow Up” raises questions about our highly observed younger generation and the ethics of posting cute kid videos on You Tube. At one point the mother of the girl profiled in “The Kids Grow Up” said to her husband, the girl’s father and a documentary filmmaker, “Just think, when she works through all this in therapy, she can bring the footage with her.”

I don’t write much about kids anymore; writing articles for parenting magazines and an anti-parenting-book parenting book cured me of that tendency. But this article brings it all back, the self-absorption, the child-absorption, the difficulty of raising kids these days. I’m glad I’m at the end of my child-rearing years, not the beginning.

Still House

Still House

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Our youngest is visiting our oldest in college, so we are alone: Tom and I and the dog. Downstairs we busy ourselves paying bills, filing insurance claims (the children may be gone but the paperwork of parenting goes on).

Upstairs, though, upstairs — three empty bedrooms stretch like a long sigh down the hallway. The shower is still, the hairdryer, too. I catch myself talking softly. Amputation is too strong a word, but this is more than missing. I’m glad I have a couple years to ponder the imagery here. It will take at least that long.

Serendipity

Serendipity

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With two kids in college and one in high school, hanging out together is a matter of timing and luck. Someone goes out later than she had planned; another stays in. Tom and I go to bed later than we would otherwise. Eventually, we all end up in the kitchen.

We don’t do anything special: We laugh, complain, roll our eyes, hug, nag, eat a bowl of cereal and go our separate ways.

But these moments are what I remember when we’re apart.

Optimism

Optimism

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Yesterday I traveled to Maryland to see my parents, who are visiting from Kentucky. My mother is starting a museum; my father is planning his next Eighth Air Force reunion. They are proof that getting older is not just about loss; it may also be about gain.

Mom and Dad are children of the Depression — but they are not depressed. They come from an era where people largely stayed in their hometowns, where most interaction was face-to-face. They are old enough to tell it like it is. After I’m with them I feel clear-headed and strong. I feel optimistic.