My baby boy, only infant son and youngest my four children turns 21 this weekend. I know, I already wrote about him leaving for his junior year at Towson. And he’s all settled into his classy apartment, doing things like meal planning that he certainly never learned from me.
But you’ll have to bear with me once more, as this Labor Day signifies the last one where I’ll have a kid who has to use a fake ID to drink. As a bit of nostalgic mom, dealing with aging and officially having four bona fide adult children is quite a transition. And if you’ve been a reader of mine for awhile, maybe you’ve been on some of this journey with me.
Over 30 years ago, as a freshly minted new parent, I had a newspaper column in the Frederick News-Post called Quite Contrary. You’re hearing it here first, but that’s also the title of my upcoming essay collection being released in November. I’ve written well over 700 articles just here at Splice Today, in addition to many other publications. Quite Contrary will be a “greatest hits album” (rolling my eyes, never thought of myself as anything more than a pretty mediocre writer, but I’ve consistently shown up at least) of some of my favorites.
As part of the process, I’ve spent this summer culling through that mountain of words and in doing so, as a result of my terrible memory, have rediscovered memories long faded. In particular, re-reading the stories about Bobby always makes me cry. I’m grateful for my writing career, as financially unfruitful as it’s been, because I didn’t realize over these years that I was weaving a scrapbook tapestry of memories I wouldn’t have otherwise been able to access: details that otherwise would’ve been lost.
So I’ve choked back tears or just let them flow this summer as I’ve read about simple things like finding the toilet seat up in my house for the first time to discover that my son was suddenly standing when he peed, the terror I had when we put in a pool and that my worst nightmare was that he’d drown so he learned to swim before he was two (his sister still talks today about saving his life when she was 3 in that pool), or the sweetest story I’d forgotten about how we had a chocolate covered cherry club because years ago I’d keep single wrapped Cella cherries in my nightstand in case my nerves fell apart when I was raising the kids and needed to sneak off for mommy’s helper chocolate and one time I shared one with him and it became this tiny little secret club we had. There was even a long-lost photo in a Splice story about how he had on a Phillies shirt one day and asked me to put on mine “so we’d match”— a thing that will never happen again since now that he has free will he’s a die hard Orioles fan, and you’re damn right that’s how the photo for this article got chosen.
Of course, there are the baseball stories. I wrote about my first game score keeping for his little league team, how terrified I was during that first pitch when he became a pitcher, and the devastation of losing the little league playoffs. A favorite article Pick me out a winner was about the summer we spent watching all the movies about baseball and what our favorites were. Even recently, now that he works as a professional umpire, I wrote about the automated ball-strike (ABS) challenge system.
Being a writer and a mother at the same time creates challenges. Our kids have private lives and don’t want them broadcasted all over the internet. Long ago in the “mommyblogger” era (man, I don’t miss that term), I spoke at the national blogging conference on that boundary between stories we have a right to share as mothers and stories they have a right to protect as individuals. When our kids become adults, as writers we don’t tend to write about them as much beyond passing mentions or anecdotal tales. They have their own lives to lead and our roles switch from leading to supportive. I’m fine with this. “To be here” is fair and enough. And yeah, I’ll still write about them once in awhile because I mean, I’m still alive.
Sometimes a little distance can seal a bond we established when they were young. Bobby didn’t really want to hang out with me in middle or high school, it was a fist-bump in the dugout, hand him a plate era. But now that he has a fancy apartment? I’m getting meal prep and schedule grid photos, utility customer service stories that crack me up, phone calls for the first time in history, and text messages that are more than 2-3 words. My mother’s heart, ravaged with the tears of missing him, feels happy just to feel needed in any way.
Happy 21st birthday, kid. Don’t forget the chocolate covered cherries on Mother’s Day.