My thirteen-year-old and I sat across a sticky table from each other at the local donut shop. If I remember right, he had this maple-frosted thing that was the size of a small planet, totally at my permission (unusual for my Sugar Nazi tendencies). His tears had dried by now, leaving a whisper of salt on his cheeks.
“I just feel like I have more setbacks than wins,” he shrugged, so clearly in pain.
I sat at lunch on Sunday with a handful of friends over turkey with homemade gravy and mashed potatoes (“So much for Keto,” mumbled the woman dishing up next to me). Of all things, the topic turned to high school wrestling. Two of the guys next to me had competed in high school.
One of them, Marshall, is 6’3″. In high school, he was upwards of 190 lbs. Maybe that’s why I was surprised at who he said were the most formidable in the sport: The kids from the school for the blind. In fact, one of them was the state champ during Marshall’s years in competition. At the time those students had no other sports other than swimming in which they could compete; baseball, basketball, and football were all out. So they competed year-round.
Even more than that, we all reflected aloud, was a blind wrestler’s exaggerated sense of touch. We’ve all heard that with the loss of one of our senses, our other senses rally to compensate (think of Stevie Wonder or Ray Charles).
Parenting has this way of exposing a part of who you are in ways both beautiful and terrifying.
As in, Wow! Who knew I had this gift for creative teaching? Or, Who knew I could handle this amount of laundry and still emerge with enough panties to fight the day?
But also, as author Elizabeth Stone has written, Making the decision to have a child is momentous. It is to decide forever to have your heart go walking around outside your body.
There was still snow regularly fluffing up the ground when I pulled out my seed starter this past winter. I enlisted my kids to extract seeds from little packages with technicolor images, and I was a little giddy with the vivid pictures in my head of a blooming porch and deck. For more than a month, my little sunroom was overtaken by pots, sitting there like kids waiting for summer vacation.
But then, I traveled for nearly a month, leaving my kids to maintain watering. Oh. And then there was a drought, to the point that the wooden Smoky the Bear stationed next to the highway held a sign reading the fire danger was “extreme” (and indeed, resulted in at least three area forest fires). In no shortage of irony or demise to my ailing plants, last week brought five afternoons of hail, plus area flooding that shut down the main highway. I was dumping water from the peonies I’d purchased, their two limp, torn leaves a far cry from the pink globes in my head.
It was in a passing conversation, see. Finally all the dots were connected, and I knew. I realized what her pet sin was. It was probably one she didn’t even see as I saw, considering just how conniving and blinding these tend to be.
But what’s telling is this: For at least 24 hours, I did not feel compassion for her. I didn’t pray for her. I didn’t use it to understand her more. I didn’t use it to examine my life for my own corrosive habits.
So I have a teenager, and another just about. Most of me is tickled pink about all the real conversations we get to hold, all the fun we have as a maturing family, all the crazy jokes they tell me that leave all of us laughing.
And there’s this leeettle part of it that scares the bejeebies out of me.
Seemingly separate note: I have recently acquired an agent for a non-fiction book I’m writing, which makes my heart do little cartwheels of happiness. It was a moment I wasn’t sure would ever happen.
Allow me to sketch for you a brief (yet oh-so-vivid) moment from about eight years ago. You would have found me slumped against the wall in the hallway one afternoon. He was only a year and a half old–and the potential for catastrophe was spreading before me.
Funny thing is, I don’t even remember what my then-toddler did to cause me to groan in despair. I just remember a lot of the stories that give me a pretty good idea: like that time while I was in the bathroom, when he pulled a barstool up to the counter, snatched a packet of drink mix from the top of the toaster oven, wrenched it open, and sprinkled it around the house like fairy dust.
It’s an interesting dynamic for an Americans traveling to Asia or Africa when we first encounter the shame/honor thing in cultures. To my naked eye, it’s sometimes looked like them not telling the truth.
I’m probably going to botch this story–but I think of my sister and her husband in Asia looking for a pair of shoes. The shopkeeper says, Of course we have your size! but comes out repeatedly with pairs too small…and then actually hides. (Yes. Literally.)
But is there an element of truth to graciously covering someone’s weakness? What if they…don’t have what we want?
Missed the earlier posts in this series? Get ’em here.
One of my favorite moments from Christmas break found my daughter and I in my little sunroom, paintbrushes in hand. She was trying out her new easel, and I was leaning against the loveseat, watercoloring. A happy surprise was how much she shared about what was going on at school.
My friend gazed at me through FaceTime, a kind smile on her face. “I just want to let you know that I just counted you saying the word ‘stupid’ six times when talking about yourself.”
Yikes.
She grinned. “I’m telling you this for your sanctification.” A little church-girl humor there. I thanked her.
![Now You're Speaking My [Love] Language](https://www.janelbreitenstein.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/love-languages-text-1.jpg "Now You're Speaking My [Love] Language")
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