Ladies and gentlemen, an announcement: we’re getting an emotional support dog.
I know. This is a big deal. We already have Penny the Wonder Dog. Why would we want another? I’ve been told she’ll be our last dog, and I’m pretty sure she thinks the same, or at least the only dog we’ll have while she’s around. So, like I said, a big deal.
Late last week, as we pulled up to an event center at the base of the Wasatch Mountains, I flashed back to the moment we arrived at a hospital more than seventeen years ago. I felt the same kind of excitement and fear now as I did back then, minus the Lamaze breathing.
“I have no idea what’s about to happen.” I told Mike.
We’d been looking forward to seeing our son, but for most of the past six weeks, knowing he was safe and also not under our roof, what I’d been feeling mostly was relief. After a difficult year and excruciating last three months, we’d needed the respite.
That’s a hard feeling to have about your child.
I should start by letting you know I’m no sex expert. Sex isn’t even really what this is about, but I think a disclaimer is necessary if I’m going to post anything remotely related, considering how much traffic comes my way since I wrote that thing about pineapples––really just speculation on whether our neighbors were swingers (jury is still out on that)––which was picked up by a porn aggregator site that now regularly steers about a third of my blog traffic this way.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not one to complain about an audience, ever. But I think whether you’re here for the pseudo-porn or the more regular fare of random, inane stories, it might be good to switch up to higher-brow entertainment once in a while, just sayin’…
Anyway, where was I? …Right. Boffing. Boinking. Bumping Uglies. The Horizontal Greased-Weasel Tango. Or more specifically, straightforward conversations with teenagers on the topic.
Dear Rev. Bill,
Five years ago, this summer, one of our boys made an off-hand comment about homeless people being “scary,” and I realized our privileged children needed an opportunity to rub shoulders with some of the more vulnerable members of our community. We started serving dinner at your shelter on a monthly basis.
As volunteers, we have served families with young children, older couples, adolescents the same age as our own boys, and young men and women dressed in work coveralls or collared shirts. We’ve also served the folks we expected to see when we began, people who hold signs on street corners, and the gentleman in the stocking hat we pass each Sunday as he enjoys a cup of coffee in our church lobby.
We’re not demonstrably religious people, but we tend to find volunteer activities that conform to our values, which happen to align with the teachings of Christ. He’s the one, you’ll remember, who directed us to “love one another.” He also said something about “that which you’ve done to the least of these you’ve done to me.”
There’s probably supposed to be an “onto” and a “thy” in there, but you get the point.
We’ve received far more than we’ve given in this effort. I’m almost embarrassed at my satisfaction in the hearty thank yous and well wishes and wide smiles we get as we pass trays across the counter.
I was on a run one morning a little while ago and disturbed a family of geese, two adults and about half a dozen goslings. They darted out from their grassy spot on the canal bank and began crossing the road.
I passed and they settled again—right in the middle of the road actually, a few of the babies plunking themselves down on the dappled pavement. A car approached, slowly, and I kept running, figuring the geese would get out of the way eventually.
Except they didn’t. I turned to see two more goslings had settled onto the asphalt, the parents in no hurry to move them along. The woman in the stopped car shrugged at me.
I returned and tried shooing the geese off to the side. The mama closest to me hissed, so I squirted her with my bottle, and then aimed the water at her brood, who finally decided it was time to stand and continue crossing. Momma kept hissing as they all got to their feet and meandered off. The woman in the car rolled forward and thanked me as she passed.
Stupid goose mom, I thought. So focused on me, she can’t see her whole family’s about to be squashed.
Then I realized how appropriate that metaphor was for me, in light of the ass-kicking parenting has given us these past few weeks.
Earlier this week, I was walking the dog and I came across the house of my new favorite neighbor.
I don’t know if he does this every year for Halloween, just started this year, or maybe someone new moved in and is distinguishing him or herself as the new neighborhood Halloween master. I’d never even noticed the house before now. Up until recently, the house next to it, the one closer to the main thoroughfare, was much more noticeable, mostly for being a complete wreck.
I don’t ever remember being that little girl who envisions her wedding. I don’t remember setting any particular expectations of parenthood, or thinking about what my first house might look like.
There is one little daydream I have long entertained, though, without really ever thinking about it: that of our kids going to the same university their dad and I were attending when we started dating.
Since the boys were little, we’ve been taking the six-hour drive North to Moscow, Idaho, for a football game every fall as often as possible. There were years we couldn’t make the time, or waited too long to get a hotel room, but there was a while when we made it a regular habit.
We joked about indoctrinating our kids as future Vandals. We bought all the swag, we took tours through living groups, we showed them where we’d lived and hung out. They dug it. And who wouldn’t? The Palouse is ridiculously gorgeous in the fall when we would visit, and the 130 year-old campus is the picture of time-honored tradition, with cobblestone lanes weaving through stately brick buildings. I’m sure most of it doesn’t look much different from when my grandparents attended in the 1920s.
For someone who has such a crappy memory, I remember pretty vividly that time I was late in my third trimester with our first son, feeling ginormous and crabby. Summer was coming, friends were gathering for an outdoor concert in the lovely late spring weather and I, too tired to go out, bloated, with a bladder squished to the size of a peanut, wondered how forty weeks could seem like such a long time.
This was just the worst.
Then we were bringing home our baby, all 8 pounds and 21 inches of never-seemed-so-small and me huddled in the back of our car. I rode, holding his head steady in the impossibly large baby carrier, wondering what would happen if he just stopped breathing in the middle of the night, or failed to thrive, or to develop the muscle tone necessary to ever hold up his head, or the ability to reach out and grasp and learn. Or how terrible it would be if he came down with some horrible disease and we had to watch him suffer.
I took him to work with me, the first in our office to try out our new baby-friendly policy. I tried to breastfeed discretely in staff meetings at first, but after a while I didn’t care who saw my bare boob because I had carted in seven carloads of baby gear that morning like I did every morning and would lug it out that evening like I did every evening, with him in a carrier on my chest. I was perpetually exhausted and covered in spit up and not getting anything done and sometimes I wondered if my back would snap right in two.
Forget pregnancy, this was the hardest.
It’s mid-summer and time to face facts: we have a kid bound for college in the fall, and I have some things to do to prepare.
He’s not going to be close, either. He won’t be coming home on weekends to eat home-cooked meals or do his laundry. In fact, he won’t be able to come home at all for more than a couple of weeks at Christmas.
He’ll be living in a dorm that isn’t unlike those here in the US, except he won’t have a cafeteria with a range of meal plans to choose from. He’ll have his own kitchenette to share with a few other roommates and have to be responsible for shopping for groceries and cooking his own meals. This has me a teensy bit worried, I’ll be honest.
He asked me the other day if I could jot down a few recipes for him, and for the first time I started wondering if we’ve adequately prepared this kid for adulting. How will he fare if they don’t have Hot Pockets in Austria? And what about his other favorite foods? I know from experience shipping a box of Cheetos overseas is far more expensive than the Cheetos are actually worth (granted, I’m not a Cheeto aficionado).
Don’t get on my case, you guys. I’ve spent a lifetime foisting as much healthy food on this kid as I could. But left to his own devices he swings toward Hot Pockets and Cheetos. And Taco Bell. He’s an adolescent male, there’s only so much I can do.
So, I’m trying to put together a set of reality-based recipes, knowing he’s not going to keep a lot of chopped produce on hand for quick salads, or broil up a sheet pan of marinated chicken and vegetables for a healthy dinner.
Here’s what I have so far:
You know how parenting is mostly telling people stuff you would have thought was just common sense, and then repeating yourself until you think you sound crazy, right?
There’s the early parenthood version of this phenomenon, where you focus mostly on safety issues:
“No, we don’t put (toy/bodily appendage/instrument of destruction) (in your mouth/up your nose/on your brother/down the heat register).”
… or social mores:
“It’s not polite to (stare at/comment on/make an arghh sound like a pirate at)(random strangers/that guy at Applebee’s wearing an eye patch).”
Parents of older kids still get to hear themselves saying stuff they probably think shouldn’t have to be said. It’s just that there’s a little more nuance involved as kids age.
There’s stuff like:
“No, you can’t keep a pet (scorpion/lemur/tarantula), because it’s (dangerous/illegal/icky).”
… And:
“There is to be absolutely no (beer brewing/distilling/any project requiring a grow light in your closet) because it’s (smelly/dangerous/smelly and dangerous).”
Our kids are older now, and I guess I thought we were wrapping up the this-stuff-shouldn’t-have-to-be-said shtick, so I was a little astonished last week when I heard one thing in particular coming out of my mouth.
It’s coming up on prom season. I don’t think either of our boys is getting excited about prom any time soon, but our exchange student is definitely getting into the prom groove.
If you’ve been around here for a while, you know we regularly host foreign exchange students. Doing so gives us a fair amount of insight on the American high school experience as compared to the high school experience pretty much everywhere else. Because the American experience is what it is, we get a lot of opportunity to explain stuff that can be difficult to explain. Things like lockers, and marching bands, and school sports aren’t part of the high school experience anywhere but here.
And then there’s prom.
Back in my day, prom was a lot more straight forward … but probably still would have needed explanation, with all the tulle, taffeta and Aqua-Net, the matching of corsages to cummerbunds, photos and dinner, and maybe a disco ball and some spiked punch.
Although this was back in the olden days, I don’t remember anyone doing anything more elaborate to get a prom date than just asking – maybe having a friend ask for you if that sort of activity made you anxious. Either way, the ask wasn’t a thing.
Today the way you ask for a date seems to be about as important as the date itself. Scavenger hunts, flash mobs, cars stuffed with balloons, a pizza with a big question mark spelled out in pepperoni delivered by gorilla-suited singing telegram. I don’t know the stats, whether any of this effort increases the likelihood of a positive response, or just serves as good social media fodder.
But who am I to look askance at a pizza bearing gorilla?
Our whole conversation reminded me of a story from a few years ago:
One night, we had just put the boys to bed when we noticed something outside. People were darting from behind a tree to the street and back again in the dark, lining up candles in front of our neighbor’s house and trying to keep them all lit at once. Some guy waited by the door, whisper-yelling instructions and trying to be inconspicuous.
The candles kept blowing out. People ran back and forth relighting them. Sometimes the candle-lighters bumped into each other. A couple of times someone ran over the candles, and then everybody scurried to realign them and then light them again.
If the Three Stooges had helped each other get dates, it might have looked something like this.
Mike and I huddled on our porch in the dark, watching everything play out. Finally, all the candles were in place and lit and the guy by the door rang the doorbell and waited.
We all waited.
One candle blew out. Then another.
Our neighbor’s dad came out and took in the whole scene without saying anything. He went back in. There was another round of frantic candle relighting. Shadowy figures tripped over each other and cursed in the dark and shushed each other and then ran back behind a tree.
The intended finally came out. She was wearing a fluffy bathrobe and a towel on her head. I couldn’t see her expression in the dark. But there was no sound. There was no delighted squeal. There was no gasp of surprise.
There was silence.
Two flames disappeared. Then two more. No one ran out to relight the candles.
Mike and I backed into the house in the dark. Shadows slunk from behind trees and disappeared into parked cars. Our neighbor and her would-be prom date sat on her front porch while the rest of the candles blew out, one and two at a time.
“We don’t know what they talked about or what happened to that poor guy,” I said.
“Whaaaat?” our exchange student stared at me.
“What what?”
“Why couldn’t she just say yes?”
Ahem, well … Okay, so here’s where we get to the things that I’m kind of surprised I have to say.
