We made it to Seoul! Fittingly, it’s Parents Day in Korea today.
As per usual there was an entourage awaiting my parents at the gate…I counted at least eight to ten people there to welcome them back:
We’re staying at the beautiful Westin Chosun in Seoul. This is the view from our window:
Time to hit the hay!
I woke up and for a few seconds was disconcerted to find the walls and windows in the wrong place. And then I remembered I was in the bed in my parents’ basement. I stretched and tried to stay in bed – sleeping in is such a rare luxury. Guilt overcame me and I decided I was being too much of a sybarite. Time to get out bed! I glanced at the clock, thinking it was at least 8 o’clock. It was 6:37, or exactly seven minutes after I usually get out of bed.
Last night when I arrived in Arlington a little after 10 pm, my mother had already gone to bed, but my father was on the couch, waiting for me to show up. The minute I walked in the door, he shooed me to bed.
“Now, go to bed! Go to bed.”
“But Dad, we’re not leaving early tomorrow, right?”
He looked me straight in the eye and said impressively, enunciating each word for emphasis: “We’ve called a taxi, and it will be here at ELEVEN am. So GO to bed.”
Sure, whatever…your middle-aged daughter with three kids of her own will go to bed, because you tell her to…And we certainly wouldn’t want to oversleep and miss the taxi that will be out there at ELEVEN am!
I went down to the basement and reorganized some of the things I had packed. A creaking noise alerted me to the presence of my mother. I went to the foot of the stairs to see her pajama clad figure looming above me in the darkness.
“Hi, Mom! I thought you were asleep!”
“I was in bed, but I couldn’t sleep because I was so worried about you, but now you’re finally here. What took you so long? Anyway, GO TO BED!”
I’m on Mom and Dad time now. My parents and my sister and I will be getting into a taxi at ELEVEN am and heading to Dulles to catch our plane to Seoul…
When I got home from work yesterday, I had just enough time to have dinner with the people I order to bed and more importantly, order to pose for photos:
“Whose knee is that?!”
“I think it’s Dad’s finger!”
“Come on, SQUEEZE your heads in!”
“BAHAHA! I love how Dad turns the phone around to see if his finger is there!”
“N! SMILE, don’t SNEER!”
“I can still your finger!”
“AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!! OK, we are so done!”
Catch you on the other side of the Pacific.
xoxoxoxox
We are a messy, disorganized, attention-deficient tribe. We stomp noisily around the house like a herd of dinosaurs. Too lazy to get up off the couch, or the armchair, or the bed, we communicate with each other by roaring from opposite ends of the house. We are histrionic. We are intemperate in our appetites. We are severely technologically-impaired, but we cannot be bothered to read instruction manuals. We break things. We lose track of time; we lose track of things. We lose our tempers.
I say “we,” but there is one member of our family, who is not like this at all. My twelve-year-old son is gentle and good-natured. He is a marvel of efficiency and organization. At 6:30 am sharp, when the rest of us are pressing our snooze buttons, he is letting the dogs out and filling their bowls with food and water. On the days his little sister decides she wants to ride the bus in the morning, he’s the one who escorts her to the bus stop, because at 7:11 am when her bus arrives, the rest of us are in the middle of eating our breakfast, or fixing our hair. Like clockwork, at 8:05 am, he heads to the bus stop himself, his backpack laden with homework that he always manages to finish by the time he steps off the school bus in the afternoon.
He is so soft-spoken that we constantly have to ask him to repeat himself. He does this with infinite patience, though by the third or fourth time we’ve asked him to repeat what he said, it’s clear by the tone of our voices that our own patience is wearing thin.
When things break down, he’s the one we call to the rescue. Even my parents, who live two and a half hours away, anxiously await his visits, so that he can fix the backlog of things that have gone wrong during his absence. Whenever one of us loses something, my son is always the one who diligently helps us to search until it is found. If one of us seems upset, he is the first to notice and the first to offer a hug and words of encouragement.
Long after the rest of us have had seconds and thirds, he is still picking at his food like a bird. Though he’s a picky eater, I once had to take his plate away from him to stop him from eating a failed culinary experiment that was universally acknowledged to be disgusting. It tasted so vile it was literally making him gag and bringing tears to his eyes, but he was trying to choke it down anyway, because he didn’t want to hurt my feelings.
I write this as a sincere apology to my dearly beloved son, who couldn’t find his watch this morning and had an epic freak out. There’s something very unnerving about seeing the calm center of a storm falling apart. I hated seeing him get so agitated. It upset the natural order of things. It made me feel jittery and irritable. Selfishly, I took it as a personal affront that he was causing such a ruckus. In a Bad Parenting Move for the record books, instead of doing what he would have done – comforting him or helping him look for his watch, I yelled at him for getting so worked up about it and for stressing the rest of us out.
Sometimes I wonder how a child like him ended up in a family like ours. Sometimes I think it must to be hard for someone like him to live in a household like ours. Always, I am astonished and grateful that he is one of us. We would be lost without him.
Related post: The Tidal Basin…or: L’enfer, c’est les autres.
Saturday
7 am. My daughter and I headed to the Charlottesville Farmer’s Market at the crack of dawn. Her Destination Imagination team is fundraising for their trip to the Global Tournament, and they procured a spot at the market to sell their produce bags. Despite high hopes and the kids’ best efforts, including my girl’s creative attempt at eye-catching millinery, the bags were not a big money-maker.
When the totals were tallied, and factoring in the $6.00 I paid for parking, our family unit made negative $1.20. Oh well…we still had fun!
10:10 am. Soccer, naturally.
I have expressly forbidden my three young soccer players to do headers…Do they listen to me?
Damn it! There go her SAT scores…
8 pm. We went to my husband’s concert with Zephyrus, an early music vocal ensemble.
It was a beautiful performance, but it was a rather late night for the younger ones. This is how they looked during the intermission:
They perked up (a little) post-concert:
Sunday
9:15 am.
We got to church a little early so my daughter could learn her instrumental part for next Sunday’s service…
6 pm. My son and I took some photos before the two of us headed back to church for his confirmation examination.
I am just about to finish up my three-year term as an elder of our church. To be completely honest, I am delighted to be stepping down. I hate going to meetings and I’m terrible at making decisions, the two things which pretty much make up the job description of an elder. There are three things I have enjoyed though…I’ve enjoyed saying loudly and often, “That’s ‘RULING Elder’ to YOU!” Cracks me up every time. Unaccountably, it doesn’t make my family so much as crack a smile anymore. Twice now I have been able to serve communion to my own children, and I will always cherish the experience of watching them come down the aisle toward me to receive the “Bread of Life” and “Cup of Blessing.” Finally, tonight I was able to be at the “examination” (really a friendly conversation) for my oldest son’s confirmation as a member of the church.
The confirmands and elders were scattered at different tables. A boy my own son has known since they were toddlers was seated at my table. It turns out, the real confirmation was that I am the world’s biggest sap. I was so moved by how thoughtful and well-spoken he was, it was all I could do not to break down and start blubbering in a completely unseemly fashion. He’s a tall, handsome young man now, but all I could see was the toddler he was…I swear it was only yesterday. Of course, I was thinking of my own son, and how he was faring at his table on the other side of the room.
As we drove back home tonight, we had one of those rare talks that only seem to happen in the car, in the dark, when the moon is in the seventh house, and Jupiter aligns with Mars…We talked about how lucky he has been to have had such stability in his life…to have grown up in a place he’ll always know as home, and to have been surrounded by really good people since the day he was born. We talked about what it means to live an honorable life. He told me how he answered the questions posed to him at his own table. The last thing the confirmands were asked to discuss was an experience of grace they may have had in their own lives. My son reported that he hadn’t been able to answer that particular question, because he didn’t think he’d had one yet.
I didn’t tell him this, but that talk with him in the car tonight was one of the sweetest experiences of grace I‘ve ever had.
o wonderful, wonderful 