Archive for parenting
Twenty-Four is Weird.
Posted by: | CommentsI have always dreamed of the next step. When I was a child I wanted nothing more than to be a teenager.
When I was a teenager I imagined how great it would be to be thirty. I sold Avon and collected anti-wrinkle creams like most teenagers collected issues of Seventeen magazine. I imagined growing old and being fancy.
So I finished highschool and had a baby and finished college and got a job and bought a house and now I am everything I wanted to be in high-school.
Except not fancy. Or old.
Ok, so maybe I am nothing I wanted to be in high-school but the point is I have built a life.
I wake up in the morning and make coffee and wake my child. I serve him breakfast and scream at him fifteen times because WHY AREN’T YOU DRESSED YET.I ship him off to school and I do work that I love and I pick him up and we eat dinner and play games and bath and bed and IS THIS SENTENCE ENDING YET.
We have routine and stability and comfort and it is driving me crazy.
I expected adulthood to be exciting. Like there would be a moment of WHOA I am an adult. But mostly it is just me trying to figure out when the last time I showered was and watching more episodes of Keeping up with the Kardashians than I’d like to admit.
So I have spent the past two weeks trying to figure out if stability was supposed to feel so itchy. If it was supposed to make you want to pack up all of your belongings and move somewhere new, or hop in your car and road trip for a week, or buy a new wardrobe, or…or…
Twenty-Four is weird.
Growing Up Together
Posted by: | CommentsWe had a hard wooden couch with cushions that were covered in green gaudy flowers. I was sitting cross legged across from my best friend drinking a Dr. Pepper. We were both panicked and nervous as we tried to figure out the best way to tell my mom I was pregnant.
I am walking into the same school that I went to many years ago. My son walks in front of me and we search out his classroom, his desk and his first ever locker.
After kisses and hugs and a billion “I love yous;” I head home to start my work day. I sit at my desk for a while and try to figure out where the time went but for once it made so much sense.
He waved for the first time when I was headed to class at a junior college. He was learning to crawl and listening to Dora in the background as I cooked dinner and did homework. He was taking first steps as I ran out the door to work nights at the bar. There were trips to the zoo and moves to new houses and first words and vacations and changes.
I feel like it was just yesterday when I was bringing him home from the hospital.
But at the very same time I feel like that was another lifetime.
The truth is, we grew up together, my child and me.
As he learned to walk and talk and go potty on the big boy potty I learned about school and growing up and friends and first jobs and careers.
Last December I graduated from college and this summer, the summer after college was un-eventful and fast and quiet and we both waded in the pool that life changes are.
And now he is off to kindergarten.
It doesn’t feel like a major life change, but maybe that is because we have had so many major life changes in the past five years that they come and go with little notice.
It simply feels like a next step. It is time for him to learn reading and writing and math and it time for me to learn…to learn…to learn things that adults do?
I imagine that my relationship with my child is different than most mother/son relationships. In the same way that I am protective of him he seems to protect me. In the same way I am learning new steps and new moves he is too.
We grow together and learn from each other and I feel like one day we are going to look back on this journey and see how big it really was.
