I picked my son up from his father's a few Sunday mornings
ago. The mechanics of that particular statement just boggle my mind. That I
have a child - a sixteen year old, no less - is one of the more astounding
facts of the universe. That I have a sixteen year old and have not yet managed
to break him - no sprains, no breaks, no
major illnesses - that's even more miraculous. He’s navigated a trauma or two,
but they have been no more than the small dramas that are part of growing up.
I fear breaking him. I
remember when we weaned him from his bottle. I sat outside his room while he
screeched and screamed for hours, begging wordlessly for his bottle. What kind
of mother was I, for God's sake? How could I deprive him of the one thing that
would bring him any comfort during that long dark night? If I just gave in, if
I would only relent-- silence! Blessed silence and a happy, sleepy, sleeping
boy! My actions were sure to produce some hell-spawn, I was sure of it. I
whimpered hopelessly to my mother on my cell phone, "Please tell me this
will not be fodder for some therapy session when he gets all sociopathic on me
in a few years, all because I wouldn't give him his bottle."
I could hear my mother, who
has suddenly become infinitely wiser over the years, roll her eyes. "Don't
be silly," she said. "You all went through it, you all turned out
just fine. You all wound up in therapy for completely different reasons."
Oh yay. Something to look
forward to.
He has been amazingly
resilient, this not- -so-small-anymore man-child of mine. He has weathered a
lot in his small life. Nothing big and dramatic, just the normal flotsam that
seems to comprise struggling middle class suburbia in the 21st century.
From the time he was born, his
dad (then my husband, no w my ex) and I both worked full time, leaving the
house before sun up, coming home in the dark. Our son shared that schedule, off
to daycare at the crack of oh dark thirty, where he interacted with strangers
for 11+ hours a day. And in time, we were the strangers. We were absentee
parents and we lived under the same roof as our son.
He survived the barely
noticeable tension of two parents coming together from two completely different
worlds, that just-below-hearing-level buzz that sets your teeth on edge for
reasons you can't quite pinpoint until you're exhausted from trying to find the
cause. Everything was an issue, because neither of us realized there were any
issues to be had. Discipline. Religion. Family. Holidays. Friends. School. Even
his diet became an issue during his first twelve months. Pick something,
anything. We approached life so differently, and our son became the unwitting
battlefield for our philosophical disagreements.
At five, he was diagnosed with
a profound hearing loss. Now there are some words you never want to hear in the
same sentence, uttered by a doctor: Neurological. Profound. Congenital. And the
best words of them all: We don't know. They ran every test imaginable, and they
still don't know how or why he has an 80% loss of hearing in his left
ear and a 20% loss in his right.
At six, thing between his
father and me started to get tense. By seven, our family life was rapidly
deteriorating. Despite my best intentions, my son was witness to our private
hell writ large. And loud. We yelled and screamed and stomped and struggled. We
did it all wrong. There are lessons in conflict resolution that he has learned
that will take God only knows how long for me to un-teach, if that's even
possible. Fodder for my own therapy sessions, I think...
By eight, it was all over but
the shouting. Even separated, my ex and I continued to shout. We fought and
argued and cried and repeated it all, again and again. Life got dicey in ways I
couldn't ever have imagined. This was not the life of a nice Jewish girl from
the suburbs, dammit. I shielded my son as best I could, but I could not shield
him from everything. Things got worse. Things got better. It was an emotional
tug-o'-war, and I was tangled in that taut rope, straining to get my end clear
from the muddy middle. Sometimes I think I even succeeded.
My son seems to have survived
all of this. He may not even be the worse for wear. He is sixteen, taking his
first steps – sometimes giant leaps, sometimes a small stutter step - at
independence from me. He is at once shy and bold and friendly and mean and
smart and smart alecky and happy and sad and whiney and a thousand other
emotional adjectives. There are days when I want to sell him to the highest
bidder. Ok, not days: minutes, maybe an hour at most. When he gives me the sixteen
year old equivalent to being weaned from the bottle, and all I want is blessed
relief from that incessant incantation of Mommommommommommom. Just five
minutes, I want to plead. Give me five minutes of peace, a chance to breathe.
But mostly, he is this
incredible gift: fragile as a soap bubble that floats, higher and higher,
catching the sunlight, reflecting clouds and sky. But tough as steel, as
leather. Enduring as love. I love him fiercely, passionately, wholly. Without
reservation. Unconditionally. I, who swore I would never have children, who was
convinced that the maternal instinct had skipped me entirely, I have been
gifted with the care and feeding of this boy, this almost man.
I tell him every day, and
have, since the day he was born: nothing you do or say could ever make me love
you any less than I do now, and I love you more than the earth and sky put
together. I may be afraid that I will break him in some way, but I also have
made it my mission to let him know that he is enough. Ever and always, he is
enough, and he is loved. And wonder of wonders, despite my faults and failings,
he knows. So, while I may provide him with endless fodder for some therapist's
couch some day, that fodder will ever and always be tempered with love.
