As June approached, swinging her green skirts over these hills and valleys, my heart was confused. My eldest son, Houdin, would be turning eighteen. As such, he would no longer be subject to any formal teaching from his parents. How to commemorate? How to mark this occasion? What I wanted was to cut apron strings, yet allow love to remain intact. This boy, who has been the source of so much frustration, self-doubt, with whom interaction has caused me so much regret for my lack of patience and angry nature, has also impressed me with his strength, creative thinking and varied interests.
Remember those games we used to play as children? They're the ones my daughters still play now, like cutie catchers, and M.A.S.H., where a group of giggling girls determine your lifelong fate. On a ripped-out sheet of notebook paper, they ask you to list different boys' names, and types of dwellings (mansion, apartment, shack or house, which is where the game gets its name), and numbers, and states, and then you choose a number, which is written very blackly in the center of the page. And then, the counting begins. One by one, your choices are narrowed, until your lies future scrawled out on the wide-ruled looseleaf before you--you will marry Victor and live in an apartment in Tahiti, tooling around in an AMC Gremlin. And you will have kids, unless you chose a "zero" for one of the numbers. You'll have six kids, or fourteen kids, or two kids. If make the mistake of thinking the number means how much money you're going to make per year, you may end up with 120,000 kids.
I don't remember a lot about my preferences for children when I was a child. I thought more about where I would live, what I would grow, what animals I would have and what kinds of clothes I would wear than if or how many children I would love.
But along came Bo, and I loved him, and, more importantly at the time and to the plot of this essay, I was attracted to him, and children were part of that equation. And I knew just a few things about these arriving beings. Here's what I knew:
- They would love and follow God and emulate Christ;
- They would be stunningly beautiful;
- They would be dressed in trendy clothes from The Gap and Banana Republic and, more importantly, they would love vintage thrift clothes;
- They would want for nothing;
- They would love nature, hiking, swimming, canoeing, and gardening;
- They would love the folk music;
- They would be incredible musicians, maybe even virtuosos;
- They would be brilliant, obedient and respectful;
- My daughters would be my closest confidantes;
- My sons would be my fiercest defenders.
I'm not attesting to the rightness or wrongness of any of these things, I'm just reporting the facts that were rattling around in that little curly-topped two-decade-old head. Some of these thoughts were acknowledged plans, with roads to the outcome mapped out neatly in journals and file folders, some were pursued with vigor and they either succeeded or were reluctantly abandoned. Some of these things just happened naturally, with little or no input from me. And, of course, it varied from child to child, from day to day.
One child, however, decided pretty much from day one that he wasn't all that thrilled with my plan. He arrived later than the doctor had estimated, took longer to be born, had a true knot in his umbilical cord, weighed more and measured longer than anyone had imagined.
As he grew, his first words were "shub up!" and "I can doooo it!" and "yeave me a-yone!" He wanted to be fiercely independent, yet didn't quite have the tools to achieve that independence. Lessons at home proved frustrating for everyone involved. Anything that could be taken apart was. Anything that could be broken was. Including, many times, my mother heart.
And while I tried to push my plans on him, he pushed right back. My plan was for a son who was naturally kind and respectful, good-natured and loving, well-dressed and tidy. He wore wrinkled t-shirts and stained jeans to church, was mouthy to me and other family members, wasn't affectionate or kindhearted. And he certainly wasn't my fiercest defender. To engage him in learning, we tried placing him in private school for a year, pulling him back out, moving to the country, giving him animal projects, encouraging his interests, increasing the household structure, loosening the household structure, abandoning the household structure. I spent evenings pouring over parenting books, on my knees in prayer, and beside his bed trying to reason him into doing his lessons or clean his room or help around the house or stick with his current interest, even if it wasn't my current interest.
Because what I wanted? I wanted him to play an instrument. And what I really wanted was for him to play piano. So as soon as we could find a piano teacher we could afford, I signed all the kids up, and we would make a weekly trek, every Monday, to spend two hours at the piano teacher's house. And every week, he would show great promise. And every week, as soon as we would leave the piano teacher's house, the lesson would be forgotten and little or no practice would ensue, regardless of the reminders, motivators or bribes I handed out.
I don't want to play piano, he would say. That's something you want me to do. It's not something I'm interested in. And we'd have a discussion about how many adults wish they could play, how you never meet an adult who plays piano and says, "Man, I've always regretted sticking with my lessons." But that didn't help. He wanted to play computer games or set up his army men or strap CO2 cartridges to the girls' dolls and set them on fire, delighting in the ensuing explosion.
I don't understand this creature.
But somehow, he still has my heart firmly in his grasp.
This boy, who has been the source of so much frustration, self-doubt, with whom interaction has caused me so much regret for my lack of patience and angry nature, has also impressed me with his strength, creative thinking and varied interests.
Finally, we decided on a graduation party, and he expressed his strong preference for having it here, at our home. He did a lot of work to get ready for it, including building a stone stairway up our front hill.
We had a small ceremony on the hillside that is our little apple orchard, blankets and quilts laid out for people to sit upon. Bo said a few words and opened us with a song, the Doxology, and then our pastor gave a short teaching to Zach--to all of us--about the lack of wisdom in most commencement speeches. Bo shared his thoughts, his memories of Houdin as a newborn baby, long and red, and the weight that came with realizing that he was the father of a son. Before he had finished his first sentence, I knew that there was nothing I could say; I was too emotional to speak. And then, Houdin spoke. He hadn't shared with me what he was going to say, hadn't written it down.
What he shared was an answer to my many years of prayer. He gave a short history of his life, how he arrived at the point where he is today. He talked about our other house, our tiny cape cod on a busy street with a little postage-stamp-sized yard, and how, there, he was given the freedom to learn, how he could choose any subject, and we would delve fully into it, exhausting all possibilities for further information before moving on to the next subject.
And he talked about the move to where we are now, this house in the country. He talked about the learning opportunities he was given, how he was allowed to be a part of the building process of this new home, climbing on the roof, pulling wiring, installing hurricane clips in the attic, nailing down shingles, carrying cement blocks. He talked about the things we let him do, and the things we made him do, and he said that he was grateful for us. He was grateful, he said, that his mother gave him the freedom to learn, and his father gave him the discipline.
I wish I could convey the feelings I had at that moment, and how glad I was that we'd decided to have that ceremony, even though there were times when I was so overwhelmed and discouraged that we came close to calling it all off.
We closed by singing a family favorite, Rich Mullins' Step by Step, a song I taught the older kids when they were just toddlers, when they would stand on step stools beside me in our old house, washing and drying dishes, and singing and singing and singing. Now here we were, surrounded by wonderful friends and family, cutting the apron strings that were tied to this boy who has done a fairly good job of driving me mad.
A few days ago, when I had some errands to run, Houdin asked me if he could stay at the church while I did my running around. See, there's a piano there, and over the past few months, he has taken to looking up the chords to his favorite songs and banging them out daily.
And there I was, watching it all, smitten by this young man who has so many times frustrated my spirit.
In just two weeks, we will load up a car full of stuff and kids, and we will attend another ceremony, this one a commissioning to send Houdin to Africa for a ten-month venture into voluntary service.
Day by day, as the time to send him comes closer, I become more aware of what this means, of how far away he'll be and how much can happen over the course of ten months. My mother heart needs prayer, comfort and healing before I can offer the same to my boy. While I know that this trip is a good thing, that it's has been orchestrated by God and that much good will come of it, my nature is to hold on, to change my mind, so panic, to worry about all of the terrible things that could possibly happen. Ten months away. Ten months. On the other side of the world.
A short time ago, we welcomed a young man named Rejoice into our lives. Six months before, his mother had stood in Africa and said goodbye to him as he ventured to the other side of the world for a year. We did our best to give him a home here, to welcome him as one of us, to make him a part of our family. I pray that Houdin, too, will find a family on African soil who will look after him while he's away from us.
And I pray that there's a piano there for him to play.
