Growing up, gaining strength

It used to be that if some piece of furniture needed to be moved, Bill and I would do it together. Our fondness for deals on used furniture early in our marriage meant that we rarely had anything delivered. Many memories of my twenties include walking backwards under the impossible weight of one side of a couch or table. Bill tried to be patient with my distance runner arms and limited strength, but my memories also include Bill sighing with impatience every time I had to put my side down to take a break, which was frequently.

            “You could have married someone burlier, if that was important to you,” I’d remind him.

            I’m not sure when it was that I moved my last piece of heavy furniture, and I certainly didn’t note it as a milestone, but one by one, as Jacob, Liam and Teenasia have grown, each one of them has surpassed me in strength—and not just by a little. Early in her eighth grade year, I commented to Teenasia, who is shorter than I, that I thought she was now probably stronger. She nodded with a bit of an eye roll that suggested this was very obvious, and then picked me up and moved me to a different part of the kitchen. I think Bill might still choose me over sixth-grade Jamie, as a moving partner, if we were the only two choices available, but more likely, he’d just wait for Teenasia or Liam to get home.

            There’s much about parenting older kids that makes me wistful for the younger years—toothless smiles; matching Easter dresses; plastic dinosaurs. But as my children grow up, I have to say that if given the opportunity to go back in time, I’d be glad to visit our younger selves, but I wouldn’t want to stay there. I like having kids who are physically stronger than me. It’s interesting to have sons who have gone further than I ever did in math and foreign language studies. I appreciate being able to text Liam at track practice and ask him to bring home a loaf of bread for dinner. So many parts of parenting involve helping children master bits and pieces of their own lives. What I’m discovering is as mastery comes, the parent and child relationship shifts. Less of my time is spent telling Jacob and Liam what to do, and more time is spent asking them questions about their activities; their thoughts; their plans. I am carrying less weight—not just in terms of furniture, but in terms of mental energy—because of the emerging adults I see.  And what I carry for the boys, for the most part, is what they ask me to carry. Unlike younger kids, who insist on doing things themselves, even in the face of disaster, my young adult sons are smart enough to know the areas where Bill and I are still ahead. They won’t ask me about Ultimate Frisbee plays, but they will question me about running or writing; they will never come to me for tech support, but they’ll approach with questions about faith or relationships. Jacob wouldn’t sign a lease for next year’s apartment without Bill and me seeing it; Liam needed to know we thought he was choosing correctly, when he decided on Santa Clara University.

            And while my daughters still hover in the preteen and early adolescent phase, I see occasional flashes of the young women they will become. Mixed in with their growing physical strength, I see emotional strength developing.

            A couple weeks ago, we had the hardwood floor of our bedroom refinished. We had to remove both dressers and the bed so that the work could be done. Bill and Liam did all the moving and I wasn’t needed.

            I didn’t mind stepping aside. My strength will be needed for other things.

           

Bunk Beds

My sons grew out of their beds and I didn’t notice.

            Liam, 17, alerted me to this about a month ago, casually mentioning that he and Jacob no longer fit in their beds and wondering if they could get new ones.

            “If we lay flat on our stomachs, our legs hang off the bed, starting around our shins,” Liam said. “But if we just curl up, then we kind of fit, so if you feel like it’s not worth the money, it’s okay.”

            I was horrified by my inattention. The boys had had their bunk beds since Liam graduated from his crib and Jacob was in kindergarten. Somewhere in late middle school, when they started staying up later than me, I stopped tucking them in. By the time Jacob started high school, we separated the bunks into twin beds. Their bedtimes extended even later as homework increased.  Looking at Liam, I realized that with the exception of poking my head into a darkened room when one of them overslept, I had not seen either boy in bed for years. And now they were both six-four. Of course they didn’t fit in their childhood bunk beds.

            The next weekend, my husband Bill and Liam went shopping and bought two extra-long twin beds. I bought some extra-long sheets online, and Liam dismantled the bunk beds. 

            Once I moved past the guilt of not noticing their growth, the nostalgia kicked in. Jacob and Liam both slept in bassinettes as infants, white baskets on wheels that I would pull next to my side of the bed at night for easy access to feed the. I so clearly remembered looking at the crib set up in baby Jacob’s room, untouched, waiting for him to outgrow the bassinette. I remember watching three-month-old Jacob sleep in his bassinette, wondering if he was big enough for the crib yet, concerned that the bumper would adequately protect him if he’d roll.

            How could it be that these boys were once so tiny I could carry them with one arm? Liam’s first car seat looked like a cradle with a handle. It clicked into a heavy plastic base in the car. He was so small he needed a little head-holder foam situation to keep his head from rolling off to the side, before he had the neck control to hold it up. Now that cradle car seat would barely hold both Liam’s shoes.

            They moved into bunk beds when toddler Teenasia arrived as a foster child. Teenasia got Liam’s crib and Liam moved to the bottom bunk. I had to stand on the ladder to kiss Jacob goodnight. Three small children in one room. In the morning, Teenasia would toss a stuffed animal into Liam’s bunk to wake him up. She was an athlete even then.

            When Teenasia went back to her biological family when she was two, and Jamie came as a foster child, she received the vacated crib and the boys had a sister as a roommate once again. When we adopted Jamie, Bill and I knew that two boys and a girl sharing a room wouldn’t work out for long, and we moved to a larger house. The bunk beds moved too.

            Dinosaur and racecar sheets were replaced by solid colors or patterns as the boys out grew the need to have smiling creatures or vehicles on their bedding. The crib converted to a toddler bed in Jamie’s room, and when Teenasia re-joined the family at four, a friend shared her daughter’s outgrown princess dollhouse bed, with a pink shuttered window for a headboard.

            Beds have such significance in family life. They represent not only rest, but refuge. When Teenasia was placed back with her biological father at age five, after being part of our family the second time, I gave that princess dollhouse bed away. It was too painful to look at it empty, each night, and wonder if Teenasia even had a bed of her own, where she was. But the boys’ bunk beds, mission style and well-constructed of strong oak, were never empty. I suppose that a reason I never discovered that the beds were too small was maybe I didn’t quite want to admit that my sons were more young men than boys. Maybe I thought their height was a temporary condition and any second they’d go back to being the little boys I thought I’d always have.

            After the purchase of the new beds, I offered the bunks to colleagues at work and neighbors, but none of them needed them for their children.

            Finally, I told Liam he could put the bunk beds on Craig’s List. I didn’t love the idea of selling the beds to a stranger. I would have rather given them away to someone I knew. Someone whose kids I could watch grow up, knowing at night those kids were snuggled in the bunk beds. But on Superbowl Sunday, three days after Jacob’s twenty-first birthday, Liam had a call for the bunk beds. I pulled into the driveway just as Liam was helping a woman load the bed frames into her SUV. She was in her late-20s and had a warm countenance about her.

            “You’ll love these bunk beds,” I said. “Do you have kids?”

            “Soon, I hope,” she said, sliding in the ladder. “I’m getting licensed to be a foster parent, so I’m hoping to have a sibling group by summer.”

            I tried to blink back my tears, but failed.

            My boys’ bunk beds were moving on, and I was glad that none of my friends needed them; glad they were going to this stranger. They had important work to do. 

             

           

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Why Catholic Schools

Headline: TBA

            Meetings don’t begin with prayer at my place of employment. As a company, we don’t gather for a weekly Mass, and there is no religious art in our lobby; no crucifixes on the walls of our conference rooms. There is no official discussion of religion, faith, Gospel values, saints that have gone before us, or saints who may be in our midst. And all of this is completely appropriate. I work for a Fortune 100 company, headquartered in Milwaukee, and the people who come to work each day come from a beautiful array of backgrounds—some religious, some not. I have no doubt there are silent prayers being offered throughout the day at work; and I’m sure that choices that many employees make in regard to ethics in the workplace are driven by their personal beliefs, but religion, prayer and faith have no part in the official company vision, mission or day-to-day operations. The vast majority of adults in the workforce share my experience. Unless a person works for a faith-based organization, such as a church, school, hospital, or social service agency, the workplace is devoid of references to the role of faith in our lives.

            And perhaps it’s my days in sleek modern rooms on global conference calls that make me so grateful for my children’s Catholic schools. Perhaps it’s the absence of the cross in my own cafeteria that makes me appreciate the one where my girls eat, at Holy Family School in Whitefish Bay. Maybe the reason I feel such joy at an evening Dominican meeting that begins with prayer is that earlier in the day I went to three meetings that only began with the review of the agenda.

            Our four children will likely spend most of their lives in secular workplaces, as my husband and I do. After graduating, they will enter a world that talks little of prayer, religion or spirituality. The gods of consumerism and achievement will snap at them, asking them to worship at the altar of status. The loud call to service they now hear from their Catholic schools will become a whisper, with the idea of servant leadership sounding paradoxical when compared to the traditional model of leadership intertwined with power. Church will be optional; religion compartmentalized.

            I see the world rushing at my children like a tidal wave, and I see my children being prepared by their Catholic schools to swim well and swim hard—not being taught to flee from the inevitable strength of the current culture and time—but rather being trained for what is to come. I see in our older boys, who have been through 14 and 17 years of Catholic education respectively, a commitment to social justice, prayer and faith that goes beyond what my husband and I taught them. I credit their Catholic schools from K4 onward for building on what Bill and I began at home—for giving them a wide variety of teachers who approached faith, prayer and service differently than Bill and me, but within a similar context. I see in our middle school girls a developing faith and a deepening morality. I watch the girls discover their own pattern and ways of praying; I see them approach service as a positive, fun event, whether it’s scooping out meatloaf at St. Ben’s meal program or reading to children at the Next Door Foundation. I see their sense of suburban name-brand entitlement begin to fade in the wake of these experiences.

            My children will need to make their own choices in terms of the place of faith, religion, prayer and service in their lives, as they grow up. Indeed, Jacob and Liam are making some of those decisions on their own, already. What I want for my children is an awareness of God present in every moment of every day. What I want is for them to know as adults is that prayer is within reach, that love comes out of prayer and service is the response to love. I want the cross, the Gospel values and the strength of the resurrection to be so much a part of who each of my children is, that even if they are in a Fortune 100 company, in a sleek modern room, on a global conference call, they will understand they are nevertheless in the presence of God. I want them to know that in a world of power and prestige, they are called to nothing more (and nothing less) than servant leadership. And I believe their current day-to-day breathing of faith in school; with God as the focus and the reason for learning; with experience of service in response to the Gospels—this way of spending their childhood will lead them to an adulthood of living their faith and understanding that God is everywhere, even when unspoken and unseen.

            Happy Catholic Schools Week. Thank you St. Monica; Holy Family; Dominican; Notre Dame.