The Down Side of Raising Kids You Like

Everything was all well and good until I was taking down the Christmas decorations yesterday.

I have been in a blissful, protective state of denial. Denial, which gets an undeserved bad rap, allows us to move ahead in the face of certain pain or imminent failure and go confidently in the direction of our dreams. Without denial, no one would get up in the morning. Or is that hope? Maybe I'm confusing denial with hope. Whatever.

Okay, so I may have been denying the certainty that life changes. It's a protective skill. I'm an expert. I believe my children are still little and will not be graduating from high school in the next nano second when I hang what are now 15-year-old hand made Christmas ornaments on an over-loaded Christmas tree, and shop for pajamas to open on Christmas Eve and purchase what seems to be hundreds of presents for the 12 family members staying for Christmas while baking bread and sweet potatoes and ham and mailing family photo Christmas cards that were as funny as I could make them.

It's when the celebration has passed and it's time to put away the precious childhood ornaments, that the truth shows up in shocking, uncontrollable places to point out that hands have grown bigger and daughters have become full-fledged human beings with lives to lead away from our blissful, protected home.

I really was doing quite well until I took a hand print Christmas paper plate lace trimmed ornament off of the tree and the poem fell off the back. I glued it back on and sobbing unattractively for 2 hours, waited while it dried. In the 200 times I read it before tearing myself away to sloppily hug the child/now laughing teenager who made it, I lived through every sweet moment and every mistake I've made as a mother and a human being.

So here, in my awakened terror, I wait for the day she isn't home when I hang it up and take it down again. There is no fairness in parenting. We blindly take these itsy-bitsy people into our homes and while we unconsciously care for them we learn to love them and become used to their noise and progress and friends and laughter and kisses. And then off they go, leaving us as they found us; blindly going about our lives, but now with a near adult shaped hole right in the middle of our path and taking the sweetness we have become accustomed to with them.

The down side of raising children you like...they leave. I just hope they come back or at least stop by.

My wise brother-in-law gave the best gift to his wife on the day his last daughter left for college. He cleaned the entire house, lit hundreds of candles and had The Grateful Dead playing when his wife walked through the door at the end of the day (well...this is the band he and his wife like). He handed her a glass of wine and said "So, where were we, when we were so rudely interrupted?" They danced for hours.

The possibility of dancing with my husband, uninterrupted for hours, keeps my head above the floor.

And my mind busy enough to survive the certainty that life changes.

Today my hand is small,
but how quickly I will grow.
Just how big and tall
is for only God to know.

So look upon this plaque
hanging on  your wall,
and memories will come back
of me when I was small.

Merry Christmas
2001
I love you!

Talia

The Fingerprint of Second Thoughts

"Thank you for not abusing me" she said.

"You're welcome..........it hasn't been easy" I replied.

My daughter, Talia, is training to be a volunteer on Teen Lifeline, the suicide hot line here in Phoenix. We had the above conversation more than once after the session on abuse.

I didn't plan to have children. They just showed up. I thought about having a baby once and then BAM! pregnant. That first one just about killed me too, not all the way to fully dead, but dented into an unrecognizable state.  I have a salvage certificate.

Six months after the first baby was born, in a moment of weakness to many, many, things, I thought about a new baby again, and BAM! same thing. I have not allowed myself to "think" since. 

Talia Hope became the second "thought." Before she was Talia, she was 25,023,800 seconds of panicked thoughts. 24, 419,000 seconds is the length of an average pregnancy. Talia stayed another 7 days to put up shelves, it seems, in the hope of staying.

There are times in my life where I have been closer to God than others. Waiting for my second child to emerge while caring for a seven-month old was a time spent in close proximity; through prayer, pleading and endless bargaining.

At the risk of sounding crazy, when I was about 2 months into the pregnancy, I heard these words in reply to an outcry, "You're having a girl. Her name is Hope."

"I am? Whose hope is she? Mine?"  I replied. "Nice."

Since you can't name a child Hope Burns (for obvious reasons) we named her Talia Hope. Talia is Hebrew/Greek and means "Dew from Heaven." Hope and dew from heaven are maybe too much to expect from a small person, especially since I've only ever hoped to keep my children alive or on good days to walk upright.

Through much doubt, I was "believing" for a pain free natural child birth while waiting for Talia to be done with her shelves. The pain free part didn't happen, which leveled my faith for awhile. When Talia was done with her shelving project, she came hurtling out of the shoot with such a force that she broke her face and her collarbone and arrived the color of soot. Since my husband and I are not that color, it was a little suspicious...But, within 24 hours she was back to resembling us, along with a little bit of Yoda..(She still doesn't like that comparison.) (The resemblance was striking though!)

The moment she was placed on my chest after her shoot hurtling entrance into this world, she cracked me up. She had a remarkable over-bite. ($5,000 later this has been fixed. Thank you Dr. Chamberlain!)  "This is the one that's going to make me laugh" I told my husband through sobs and chuckling. Which has turned out to be true.

My second moment of weakness has become a person who notices "an underlying tone of agony" in humanity and is on a mission to find out why that is. And to make everyone laugh; at her, at themselves, at all the other ridiculousness in this world. It is her sense of curiosity and humor that focuses her listening so intently. Laughter and listening. Good qualities in a hopeful lifesaver.

She won't find out if she "made" the Teen Lifeline team for another 2-3 weeks of training and finals and mock-phone calls that make her alternately break down in sobs and beam with pride. I dearly want her to pass these tests, just as I am deeply afraid that this may have too much tragedy for a tender 16-year-old to take on.

My second thought...noticed her life with us has been free of abuse,  thinks I'm cute, wants me to think this too, and is learning how to offer hope.

It's enough to make me start to "think" again. Because one sarcastic, snarky, overly observant, sweet, clever, sometimes insecure, kind, fingerprint, maybe wasn't enough.

Have you had a second thought that worked out better than you hoped? Has it changed your life? Or someone else's life that you've had the privilege to notice?

If not, here's mine. Maybe mine will help you find yours.

Yoda at 14.

Talia's fingerprint:

* kindness wrapped in sarcasm.
* Compassion covered up in a contrary, perky, shell.(hence the "it wasn't easy" comment above.)
*  is not gentle with herself, but is with everyone else.
* is love. A rescuer of precious creatures. Not the least of which is me.
 * is permanently pink, just because...

Talia, I suspect that God is giggling about His creation of you.