Milestones

It’s been hard watching Mayle move out. 

Both times. 

Still harder, is watching her grow older.  Each year, it feels, is another year away from me.  She grows up.  I grow older. 

Today she turns 21.  But to me, she’s still four years old trying to catch birds in the front yard, or singing “Whistle Man” to “This Old Man” in the backseat of the car.

I know my kids won’t stay little forever.  While it’s nice having a built-in baby, the built-in-ness ends with Max.  Technically, at three years old, Max isn’t a baby anymore. 

Who am I, if not a mother?  I’ve been one longer than I haven’t.

Knowing what her 21st birthday celebration would entail, we opted to celebrate her milestone on Sunday.  As she opened her cards and gift, I could still see a residual four-year-old Mayle with dark, playful eyes and thick, sturdy legs.  At four, she could be bought with music of the Spice Girls and a trip to the Apollo Theater to see the latest Disney movie. 

At 21, she’s outgrown both.  As she spends her youth looking ahead, I spend my advancing age looking back, wishing I could revisit an afternoon when it was just her and I, and this time enjoy it with abandon. 

Jarring me from this moment, of course, was life unscripted.  As we collectively sighed at the unexpected sweetness of boyfriend Wes’s gift, Stancey lazily injected her own commentary of, “How gay.” 

Each year is a gift.  And each year, in it’s own way, is the best year ever. 

Happy birthday, to my pixie.  To me, her birthday is most special.  My life changed for the better the day she was born.  And as soon as she recovers from what I assume will be the worst hangover of her young life, I think I’ll tell her that.

Are You My Mother?

When it comes to siblings, it’s funny how markedly different offspring can be.

Even funnier, is how shockingly similar they are also.

With my six, I’ve noticed a residual imprint of antics that defies all reason.  Just don’t try to convince any of my kids of that, because they are all unique.  They are all special. 

On a recent trip to Crocker Park, Kenny happily flapped his hands and danced in circles as we walked down the Promenade. 

Stancey shook her head and muttered, “God, he’s so weird.”

“So were you at that age,” I told her as I stopped Max from shoving pebbles up his nose.

Did I need to remind her, that although she and Kenny are a decade apart, at age five, she too felt that wearing underwear was completely optional?  She may not have been a hand flapper, but she was an amateur exhibitionist.  Lest she forget the time she attended story time at the library in a sundress minus her drawers.

Madison and Sam, though mostly dissimilar, both have the habit of sharing way too much information.  While Sam relishes in retelling lively domestic exchanges to any one who’ll listen, Madison has been known to divulge the darker side of living in a house where the household budget peters out before the next pay cycle.  When writing thank you notes for his First Communion a few years ago, he penned the classic line, “Thank you for the money.  My dad used it to buy bacon and gas.”

Sometimes, familial antics bridge from one generation to the next.  My brother David and son Madison couldn’t be more alike if they lived in the same house.  Their trademark grumbles and stomp-offs could not have been transmitted and integrated in the handful of times nephew and uncle have been together.  Sometimes, I want to put him in a wooden crate and send him off to Minnesota to live with his own kind. 

But then again, maybe putting myself in a crate with ample wine and cheese might be better.  And I wouldn’t require any shipping.

To me, it isn’t strange that when Stancey was little she was the human naked window cling, or that at one time Madison wanted a magnet large enough to pull the refrigerator away from the wall.  Now that he’s 15, he’s moved beyond magnets and into far more sophisticated venues.  Just because he prefers sleeping in a stab proof vest to regular pajamas doesn’t make him a social deviant.  It only makes him a little less comfortable.

Though some have outgrown their trademark oddities, others continue to stretch the confines of their imagination to create new ones.  Last night, as I watched Max attempt to fly off the lawn furniture with a handful of chicken feathers, I marveled at not how normal the children will all eventually become, but rather, just how skilled we eventually become at saving our oddities to those we feel most comfortable with.

Maybe it’s a form of denial, but I choose to view our modest dysfunction as more of a personality perk than a social impediment. Besides, Mayle has flown the coop, even without flapping a handful of feathers.  And last time she was home to do laundry, I noticed she does, in fact, wear underwear.