Category Archives: Parenting

Dale is in the house!

Dale Thomas, life of the party.

I crave peace and quiet, especially when I get home from work. But, in the immortal words of Mick Jagger and Keith Richards: “You can’t always get what you want.”

Yesterday when I got home, the kids were bouncing off the walls. The strange thing was that my normally quiet-as-a-lamb, ultra-responsible, rock-solid middle child was the instigator.

My son has always been a quiet child, who doesn’t talk much, and certainly never about himself. About a month ago, he brought home a semester’s worth of school work. At the bottom of the stack was the first assignment he had done for language arts: a typed, single-spaced letter that filled an entire page, introducing himself to his teacher.

“You should know that I am a very quiet kid. Every day my family has to tell me to speak up.”

“I am kind of athletic because I play soccer but other than that I run slow and I can’t do push ups very well.”

“What I like to do before school when I’m not trying to get ready really quick is to draw funny pictures and cartoons, which I share with my family. I like doing this because I love to make people laugh.”

“Some things you need to know about me is that I suffer from back pain. I assume its just long term affects of my limes disease, which I had about a year ago…So if you see me fidgeting a bit it’s just my back so don’t worry about it.”

By the time I got to the end of the letter, tears were rolling down my face. His letter was so sweet, gentle, honest, and open. It felt unbearably sad to me that I had gotten my best glimpse into my son’s inner life through a school assignment.

Lyme Disease did terrible things to my son. What was even more upsetting to me than the fact that he was suffering from aches and pains, was the change in his personality. He started acting like a grumpy old man and became even more uncommunicative than usual. I would have to say that even now, about a year and a half after he was first diagnosed, he still has not bounced back 100%.

Last night at the dinner table, however, he was unusually animated and jovial. His eyes were sparkling. His playful mood was infectious. His siblings were caught up in the novelty of his high spirits and were getting riled up.

“Who are you and what have you done with my son?” I asked him.

He held his hand out to me to shake and said, “Hello, I’m Dale Thomas and I’d like $13,000, no, let’s make that $15,000 dollars ransom for your son.”

Dale turned out to be quite a character: a slickster, a charmer, a merry hooligan, a man about town, a comedian, and a rabble-rouser all wrapped up into one…His siblings were spellbound and completely and utterly in his sway.

“Come on, eat your dinner,” I kept urging as the antics escalated to a feverish pitch.

“T might like chicken, but I don’t particularly care for it.”

I glared at T/Dale. He continued to pick at his plate, as he redoubled his efforts to keep his audience of two highly entertained. I kept having to ask the kids to calm down, take it down a few notches, be quiet…PLEASE!

As we were finally finishing up, I asked him to wipe the table after dinner.

“Aren’t you being rather rude, asking a guest to do chores?” T/Dale asked me with a mischievous grin.

The last straw was when the kids got so swept up by the highjinks, they started loudly drumming their feet. I lost it. I barked out a peremptory order for SILENCE!

That night I popped a couple Advil and crawled into bed. I finally had the peace and quiet I had wanted so desperately. I also had the time to reflect upon the evening and was stricken with remorse and filled with regret. Why couldn’t I have been more tolerant? Why did I have be such a buzzkill? Why hadn’t I played along with my son’s rare display of exuberance, rather than try to squelch it?

This morning I gave him a hug and apologized for having suppressed Dale so meanly.

“I’m sorry I was such a jerk about Dale. He was so much fun. Everyone was having such a good time and I ruined it by being so crabby. Do you think he might come back for a visit sometime?”

There was a twinkle in his eye as my son said, “He’s upstairs hanging out in my room. He may still be here when you get back from work.”

I hope so.

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Im/maturity

It can be tricky to have children who are at different developmental stages. Our conservative strategy for navigating these treacherous waters is to wade in only as far as would be knee-deep for our youngest child. Recently, for example, the kids watched Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, even though the boys would much rather have seen Gravity. A couple years ago I caught my daughter, who was then six years old, reading The Hunger Games, which I had gotten for her oldest brother. I snatched it away from her and told her she could read it when she was older.

The other day I asked my thirteen year old son, “When do you think T will be old enough to read The Hunger Games?”

“Well, to be honest, I think she’s old enough now.”

“Really? But she’s only a third grader.”

“Yeah, but to tell you the truth, she’s way more mature than I am now.”

“Seriously? You really think so?”

“Yeah. And when I realized that, it kind of ruined my day a little bit. But I’ve come to terms with it, and I’ve accepted it now.”

This may also explain why I’ve heard the thirteen year old say to his younger brother, “We have to be nice to T now, so she’ll let us play video games in her basement when we’re all adults.”

I’ll be back in a week…Happy weekend and Thanksgiving!

The Inferno

Life in our household has been full of stress and strife lately. I’ve been having terrifying nightmares, which continue to haunt me in my waking hours. Migraines keep grabbing me in a vise-like headlock. The pain, always concentrated in one throbbing eyeball, makes me clench my teeth as I wait out the four hours until I can pop three more Advil. To tell you the truth, lately there have been moments when I have wallowed in self-pity and dark despair. I’ve asked myself, “My God! What have I done to deserve this?”

Here’s the thing. I have a beautiful child, who is intelligent, creative, talented, funny, sensitive, generous, and kind. He has always marched to the beat of his own drum, and I admire and respect him for it. To be honest though, I have to admit that I’ve also regularly engaged in epic battles with him because of this. We all have to function and live in a world of rules and deadlines and norms, I reason to myself. And so I try to coax and cram and bash my square peg son into the round hole over and over again. I do this out of love and concern for his future happiness, but all the good intentions in the world can’t transform it into a pleasant experience, or even a reasonable endeavor.

In school, children are assessed in ways that may make sense for most, but not for those who do their homework, and then routinely forget to turn it in or lose it between home and school. They don’t work for kids who can’t remember to bring home their textbook to study for the quiz they have to take the next day. The standard assessments simply can’t capture the abilities and gifts of children, whose minds crackle with intelligence, but shut off when confronted with boring, routine tasks. It can be exhilarating to parent such a child, but truth be told: at times it can also be thoroughly exhausting and demoralizing.

A couple nights ago, my son managed to finish his homework, take his shower, and practice his piano pieces at a godly hour. At the beginning of the school year we had optimistically stated that his bed time would be 9:30. Lately, bed time has been whenever we tell him he simply can’t work any longer on whatever paper, project, problem set, lab, or translation is due the next day, because it’s already 10:30, 11, or past midnight. On that blessed night, all of these tasks were done and there was a still a little time to spare before bedtime. It was a miracle.

My son and I looked at each other awkardly, uncertainly, not quite knowing how to handle this unexpected turn of events. This usually would be about the time when I would trot out a fist shaking “You can do it! Shake it out!” lecture à la Bela Karolyi, or a “Pull it together and FOCUS, kid!” lecture or the: “My head is going to explode if we keep having this same argument” lecture or the “Just crank it out, please, I’m begging you for the love of all things holy: just. crank. it. out” lecture, or the “Think, really think if there’s anything else you’ve forgotten that you need to be working on right now” lecture. You get the picture. That night, there was no need for any of those lectures.

“Well…are you heading to bed then?” I finally asked.

“I think I’ll stay down here and just talk with you a little, if that’s ok with you” he replied as he settled himself on the couch at my side. He hastened to add, “NOT about school or homework or anything like that. Let’s just chat.”

We did just that. When he finally did head to bed, I heard him say as he rounded the corner, “Oh, I forgot something.”

Jesus, Mary, and Joseph! My heart sank and I tensed up as I waited to hear him tell me what important assignment he had forgotten he had to do. And then he came back into the family room where I was sitting, because what he had forgotten was to give me a goodnight hug.

As I hugged this extraordinary child, I thought to myself, “My God! What have I done to deserve this?” These moments of grace remind me why I would walk through fire for this boy. We’ll walk through this Inferno together and there will be love and light at the other end. Amen.

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Country Bumpkins

On Friday afternoon I pulled into the pick up line at Nicholas’ school and settled down to wait for him. Soon I spotted him running towards me with his gigantic backpack slung over his shoulder and a huge grin on his face.

“Rooooaaaad trip!” I whooped as he opened the car door and got in.

It’s been a rough month for us, replete with the usual heavy doses of teen and parental angst, handwringing and recriminations. School has been stressful and that stress has bled into our home life. Too many of our interactions lately have revolved around nagging and arguing about schoolwork. We were both glad to escape from all of that, if only for a weekend.

Once we established the happy fact that Nicholas would NOT be dragging his backpack to Wisconsin, we relaxed into the hour and a half drive to Richmond International Airport. This is the first year my son has been able to sit next to me in the passenger seat, rather than in one of the back seats. It felt great to be chatting side by side, at the very beginning of our trip to visit our friends.

Dinner at Richmond Airport

Dinner at Richmond Airport

We switched planes in Detroit. As we made our way to the gate, we passed through this tunnel:

“We seriously need to have one of these in our house. You have to take a video of this!” Nicholas insisted.

“You know what Grandma would say if she saw us videotaping this?” I asked Nicholas as I complied with his request.

“What would she say?” he asked.

“She’d call us a couple of chonoms.”

“What does that mean?”

“Chonom is Korean for country bumpkin.”

“She’d be totally right. We are a couple of chonoms getting all excited about the light show. Oooo! Now let’s videotape this fountain!”:

We finally arrived in Madison, bedraggled and exhausted from our travels, but so happy to see our friends waiting for us in the lobby.

More on our trip tomorrow…