It can get downright funny. For example, the day I discovered little dark hair man growth on his upper lip and burst into tears in the middle of SAM's. Poor Tyler was begging me "don't do this in the middle of SAM's mom!" but that's where I discovered it so that's where I fell apart. Or there was the day I had to try and figure out how to measure his inseam without embarrassing us both, all the while trying to explain what 'dressing left or right' meant as I struggled to keep a straight face. And if I start making jokes about how much food he inhales, I won't stop for about an hour. Seriously, how can he eat all that and still be so rail thin? How can he consume a huge man-size meal and in the next breath tell me he's starving?
He is growing at the speed of light and he hasn't even hit his BIG growth spurt yet, that's at least a year or two away I think. He looks me straight in the eye now when we stand together which for some reason totally freaks me out. His feet are officially the size of Scotty's and I won't be surprised if next month I have to buy him an even larger size dress shoe for a wedding we will be attending. I refuse to buy the actual dress clothes until a week before we leave on our trip because I only want to have to buy them once. I am totally not ready to have to yell at a child that towers over me.
But that's the thing, isn't it? He won't really be a child. He already is not truly a child. He's become half a man while I was busy driving car pool and cutting coupons. He looks at me and asks huge questions that I don't know how to answer because I am still figuring life out myself. We have grown-up discussions about colleges, careers, politics, faith and autism. He cares for his brothers and helps me around the house and tries to 'parent' the little ones. I sit here this morning, just 2 weeks away from the end of school with tears streaming down my face because in a couple months he starts high school. It's the beginning of the end, so to speak. There are only four, precious and startlingly short, more years left of serious parenting to do for this boy-man and me. Oh, I know that there will still be parenting to do after he graduates and I know that I have already lost a modicum of influence over him, and even that will decrease very rapidly once he walks in those doors this August. I get it, I really do. I just hope I've done enough to this point and I hope I make the right choices with what little influence I have left over the next few, volatile years.
These are such challenging years. I am constantly torn by my overwhelming love and emotion for my son and the need to smack his head into oblivion for the obnoxiousness that sometimes spews from his mouth. Just a few weeks ago on our way to soccer practice I was completely worn out by the time I met my husband on the field with our 3 boys. Scott took one look at me and asked what was wrong. I said 'I'm just done' and glanced Tyler's way. He was currently arguing with me about whether or not we were late because I had said 'I wish we had gotten here a couple minutes early, I don't like to be late' when we pulled up. It didn't seem to matter to him that I wasn't actually arguing back. Scott asked and so I said 'I'm just tired. He disagrees with everything that comes out of my mouth whether or not if affects him or whether or not it's something to disagree about. I could say the sky is blue and he would disagree with me today.' Tyler caught the end of this exchange and said 'No I don't! I don't argue about everything!'.... 'nough said.
The attitude sucks. He knows absolutely everything and so, of course, we know nothing. And the emotion .... oh. my. goodness. What???? For some reason I thought boys weren't moody. I look back at my years (literally years; my poor, poor mother!!!) of crying nightly to her about how no one liked me and how I was never going to have friends or a boyfriend and who knows what else and I think thank goodness I have boys! I cannot remember my brother being moody or crying or throwing fits. Then again, my teenager angst lasted FOREVER and by the very definition of being an adolescent I was self-centered and had no clue what was happening with anyone else in the world except for ME. I guess I just missed it, because evidently it happened.
The emotion is the scariest part. I am so caught off guard by the outbursts and most of them are so self demeaning that I can't breathe. Is that truly how he sees himself or are the hormones blinding him? He takes things so seriously that when there is a problem he escalates to hysterics and the only way I can get him to calm down is to raise my voice to be heard and then I feel like a louse for yelling because he sees it as me yelling at him instead of me yelling to get his attention. I hate hearing the words 'I'm so Stupid' when he is anything but; I despise phrases like 'I give up', 'I hate this' and 'I can't take it anymore'.
Recently at dinner he said something resembling 'No one likes me, I have no one that's really family' and it chilled me to the bone. I got very still and very quiet and asked what he meant by that. "THIS is your family. THIS is who you are. It's different, it's sometimes complicated, but you are a part of TWO families that love you more than you will ever know. You are very, very blessed." And then he broke down crying because he knows that and he didn't mean that and then the stupid comments began again. Oh boy. This poor, torn up kid.
Where I see the emotion take hold the most is in physical projects that he works on. He's always been a builder, a creator. He has wanted to be some kind of design engineer since he was 9 and has only wavered in wondering what type of engineering he might want to do. He looks at something solid in front of him and immediately tries to figure out how to make it better. He has even redesigned some cheap plastic guns from the dollar store into ones that shoot projectiles and make noises and his brothers are in awe of what he can do. And he's relentless. If a project doesn't work, he keeps going back to the drawing board to improve it because he can't let it go. Because he can't let it go, the emotion will get the best of him and he'll fall apart when something doesn't work. And all I want him to do is take a break, let it go and calm down. But he can't, because he's obsessed, but if I say he's obsessed then I get an earful.
Last night as his design 'adaptation' for the science class bottle rockets didn't work out and he began to lose it over the time he had wasted and how if he had just done the rubric like everyone else he'd be done, he got so upset that he almost passed out. I think he just wasn't breathing properly because he was so angry, but it scared me. I gave him some firm rules for finishing the project within an hour, calmed him down and then got down on the floor and looked straight into his eyes. I said something like "You are going to design something amazing someday. You are not stupid. You are very, very smart. You look at everything and want to make it better, do it smarter and design it greater. That's a good thing. But there are 10 days of school left, it's 8:30 and this thing has to fly tomorrow. This is NOT the project that is going to be something different and amazing. It's just a bottle rocket." He calmed down, he finished.
This morning on the way to school he said it frustrates him that he builds things all the time and someone in his class made something very cool and he never does building projects. I pointed out that none of them had flown yet so there was no way to know how cool the other kids project really was. And then I asked him how many different light bulbs Edison designed before he found the one that worked. Tyler laughed and told me he didn't have time to make 1000 rockets. Not my point. But I told him again "You are going to design something amazing someday. Someone is going to come to you with an idea that you are going to look at and just know that it can be done and it can be done better and you are going to design it. You have it in you. I can see it clear as day. You have always had it in you. We just have to find a way for you to let off steam when your projects have a setback. You never give up and that's a very, very good thing." Was it enough? That's an answer I won't have for many, many years.
I wonder sometimes if Edison's mother wanted to strangle young Tommy too. The relentlessness, the obsessiveness are sometimes so frustrating. I have an overwhelming urge to hide his hot glue gun for the summer so he can't use it on another project that will make me crazy, but then I feel terrible for the thought since said action would stifle his creativity. The Robotics Magnet Tyler got accepted to for high school will help him refine how to take his ideas and mold them into reality. I'll probably get over the fact that he is going to learn to weld and solder before he learns how to drive, just as long as he doesn't try to do it in my garage.
He is working on a project for Algebra that is also a contest for ideas on how to develop some land that the district owns in a way that is beneficial to the community. Tyler came up with some great ideas but when he looked at Google Earth the area showed an existing parking lot and plans for a road that his teacher didn't include in their instructions. So he took it upon himself to email the district for clarification on whether or not to include those details in his design plan. He told me after the fact and read this amazingly mature email to me. Then he launched into details for his nature preserve/reflection garden/dog park plan (It's a really big plot of land, and Mandy - it's right across the street from you). Sometimes he'll wonder aloud if he really has what it takes to be an engineer or to design or invent anything and I wonder how he can't see what I can see - how every cell in his body is geared toward designing, inventing and improving, he just needs time and space to let those skills evolve.
What a beautiful mind he has, choosing Latin and Violin while trying to figure out what he wants to invent or design or create. I wish he could see it, but then like all teenagers he feels alone, isolated, out of place and disconnected. I hope I'm doing enough to ground him in reality while giving him space to test his wings. I hope that when I cut off his rants with sometimes short, unkind words that he will forgive me someday and know that it was to help him calm and refocus. And sometimes I just hope that he has a kid someday that is as much like him as he is like me. I am getting repaid the headaches I gave my mother, he should be repaid as well.
So, mom tells me that with boys there is drama and angst and emotion, but it's more short lived. By the time you get through years 13-14 it's pretty much winding down. That's good, right? Except that what you are left with after that is post-puberty man-ness. Not a half-man/half-child, but a young man. Mom says by the time Matthew was 15 and we had a life/death scare for my dad while those two were on a trip, she never saw my brother as a child again. Just a young man. Which means I don't really have 4 more years to try and help shape this kid into a decent human being-type man. I have got about a year. One year left to pour in as much motherly influence as possible for his moral fiber to soak up. After that, I'll be dealing with a young man more interested in his own ideas than mine.
I think of Proverbs 22:6 often: "Train a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not turn from it." That verse means different things to me all the time. Sometimes I use it to remind myself that all this stuff I'm pouring into my kids will be the cream that rises when they are older (and all the adolescence and angst and rebellion is over). Other times I focus on the 'should go' so that I remember it's not always about what I have done or even what I would choose, but about what God wants for my boys that should sway my decisions. And still other times I focus on the 'he' in that verse. Train a child in the way he should go. It's about this unique child, loved by me and cherished by his Creator. I have to figure out the best way to teach this child how to master his emotions and harness his skills and be the best man that he is capable of being.
There is work to be done. Just one more year (or 4 or 8, however you choose to see it), which will race by as High School takes over our lives. I have a long list of things to work on like finding a youth group he can connect with, helping him improve communication skills with loved ones and learning how to actually HEAR his alarm clock so I don't have to yell at him every morning to get out of bed. Urgh, and the kid still can't write or read cursive. And that is just the tip of the ice berg. Oh my goodness. We have so much to do!!!!
For years I've said that I am not raising three boys, I am raising three men. I truly believe that, but the reality of the first man I'm raising staring me in the eye as an actual man is kind of terrifying. Time is growing short and the man emerging from inside my little boy is becoming more evident every day. Boy, I sure hope we don't kill each other before the work is done.
Bless you my friends.
