Read Chicken Soup for Every Mom's Soul Online
Authors: Jack Canfield
Chicken Soup for Every Mom's Soul (13 page)
Reprinted by permission of Mark Parisi. ©2003.
This is how it begins: One night in early September, while watching TV, you decide to make some popcorn. So you go into your kitchen to dig out the old popcorn machine, but it’s nowhere to be found.
Then, a week or so later, you feel a chill in the air and decide it’s time to get out the portable space heater. But after an hour or two of searching you turn up nothing. Nada. Zilch. Zero.
The pace begins to quicken.
Over the next fortnight, you search for, and fail to find, such items as your hair dryer, Mr. Coffee machine, tea kettle, kitchen shears, assorted luggage, extra-large bath towels, hair mousse, Chinese wok, sewing kit, desk lamp, portable phone, electric blanket, transistor radio and electric blender.
As the mystery deepens—and the list of missing items grows—all kinds of scenarios run through your head. A cat burglar. Early senility. A friend who borrowed your luggage. A blanket deposited at the cleaners. The phone left at the beach house.
Then, before you know it, it’s the middle of October—the time when parents of college freshmen traditionally visit their kids on campus—and suddenly the Mystery of the Missing Household Items is solved: They are all residing in a room on a distant college campus—the one occupied by your college-age son or daughter.
Why is it, I wonder, that nobody warns parents that when your kids go away to college, so do all your small appliances?
And why is it that none of the child experts—not even Dr. T. Berry Brazelton—sees fit to include this developmental phase in their books on raising children: “At approximately the age of eighteen, the average, college-bound teenager goes through a period of relocating household appliances. A general rule of thumb is that after each visit home, the student takes at least four additional appliances and/or household items back to college.”
My own first encounter with this developmental phenomenon occurred while walking across a campus on freshmen parents’ weekend. From a distance, I spotted my son. I recognized him, in fact, by the sweater he was wearing— an intricately patterned ski sweater I purchased for him in Norway.
However, upon closer inspection, I confirmed that while it was, indeed, the aforementioned sweater, it was not my son.
“He lent it to me,” said the young man who was not my son. He then directed me to my son’s dormitory.
And what a pleasant surprise it was, upon arriving at the entry to my son’s room, to be greeted by an old familiar friend—the “Welcome” mat that had disappeared from my very own front door just a month before.
Inside, I was made to feel equally at home. There, reclining among the batik-covered pillows from my den, I sipped a pineapple frappe from my blender and marveled at how many wonderful patterns could be formed just by stacking up assorted pieces of my luggage in an interesting way.
And the climate control in the room was excellent. My space heater going full blast in the bathroom produced, I thought, just the right temperature, even on a day when it was eighty-five degrees outside. Another plus about the bathroom was that I got to use my own towels again—the monogrammed ones that had been given to me as a wedding gift.
I also enjoyed seeing my white, pearlized wastebasket and matching soap dish again. I’d forgotten how attractive they were.
To my surprise, I felt equally at home in the room across the hall. Invited there by my son’s friend, I noted how attractive my desk lamp looked sitting next to my portable phone. And what good reception my radio got, even up here in the hills of the Berkshires.
From there, it was a movable feast over to a room occupied by another of my son’s friends. The popcorn made in my popper never tasted better, and I must say that my old patchwork quilt looked mighty good thrown across the back of his friend’s futon.
In fact, I was so impressed with this recycling of household goods that at Thanksgiving I scarcely minded when the sleds disappeared from the garage, or after Christmas break the disappearance of an Edward Hopper poster, a small side table and a bedside reading lamp.
At spring break I minded even less when a number of sheets, pillowcases and pillows—along with a small desk chair—vanished. Actually, the house was beginning to look more spacious, less cluttered, somehow.
What I did mind, however, was that awful day at the end of the school year when the son arrived home with a U-Haul trailer. I think you know what was inside.
Alice Steinbach
“Sorry. I thought you were ready
to be kicked out of the nest.”
From
The Wall Street Journal.
Reprinted by permission of Cartoon Features Syndicate.
Time is never more relative than when stretched across the full span of childhood. When my sons were toddlers, sticky and close, omnipresent and ever needy, my days were measured out in two-hour intervals between meals and naps and baths and stories. As our lives moved forward in these minute increments, I did not think it possible they would one day be leaving home “before you know it,” as innumerable friends told me. After serving them some twenty thousand meals, lowering the toilet seat thousands of times, issuing countless reminders that cars need oil to run, how could a mother so centrally engaged in their growth not know they were growing up?
Can a woman really forget cooking two and a half tons of macaroni and cheese? Can she forget playing solitaire until dawn on snowy nights, waiting for the sound of tires crunching into the driveway? Can a mother really not notice that her former baby’s life has changed completely when he receives, among his high-school graduation gifts, a pair of purple silk boxer shorts and a scented card written in a dainty script? No, I think a mother always knows these small incidents are adding up to Something Big. We just understand, like the fans who come faithfully to the Indy 500 every year, that it’s going to be a long day.
Lurching and stalling through the early years, time moved slowly as the rookie drivers tested their limits, learned to take the curves and conferred with their pit crews. I got used to thewhining noises and oily fumes, paying only half-attention through each repetitive cycle until a warning flag or frightening accident snapped my mind back on track. Then, in the riveting final laps, time suddenly accelerated. Fixed solely on the finish line, convinced they knew all they needed to know, my sons put the pedal to the metal and ignored any further signals from the pit. They barely stopped home long enough to refuel with a favorite pot roast.
While they forged ahead with a speed that bordered on recklessness, I found myself falling back in time, seized with a ferocious desire to remember everything about this long day at the track. As twenty years of effort compressed in those final laps, I felt the stirring excitement and lumpy throat I often get in movie theaters. Living with two jocks has undoubtedly had a profound influence on my imagination, because the musical score that kept playing in my head as I watched them fling themselves into the world was not Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto or Pachelbel’s Canon, but the theme song from
Rocky
. I know I should be far beyond the moist, sentimental lumpiness of motherhood by now. But as it turns out, I’m not.
In those months before Ryan and Darren left home, a familiar gesture or facial expression would trigger a sudden onslaught of memories, I would see the faces and hear the voices of all the children in the family album, all the little guys who used to pepper my life but who have now disappeared. Whenever I caught a certain provocative smile, a long-suffering frown, I would be suddenly infused with a peculiar clairvoyance. I would travel back and forth in time, remembering the first time that look appeared, knowing how often it would return to delight or haunt me. I was swamped by one of these mind floods in a shoe store last August, as Darren tried on a pair of loafers in a size that could have comfortably fit both of my feet in one shoe. I remembered the first time I saw those astonishing appendages eighteen years earlier then attached to the smallest, most fragile human legs imaginable. Once more, I was standing woozily next to his crib in the preemie intensive-care nursery, leaning against his incubator for support as I watched his labored breathing. This impatient son, who had crashed into being two months before his due date—very nearly killing us both—lay unconscious amidst his tangle of wires and tubes while I tried to suppress fears about underdeveloped lungs and heart muscles.
He was tininess itself, his delicate pink form stretched nakedly under sunlamps to cure his jaundice, his skinny limbs covered with dark, prenatal fuzz—cilia hair for the amniotic sea he was still supposed to be in. I watched him take a wet gulp of air and then, suddenly, stop breathing entirely. My own throat seized as the line on his heart monitor flattened. The nurse jumped up when she heard the alarm and rushed to his incubator, flicking his tiny heel a few times until the rhythmic beeps of his heart returned again.
“Apnea,” she said, sighing with relief. “They get so tired they forget to breathe.” She then went back to her paperwork at the nursing station, little Darren Oliver went back to sleep, and I worried about brain damage for the next five years.
Darren’s traumatic birth was my first encounter with the reality that motherhood was not, and would never be, entirely under my control.
The young rookies eventually morphed into grown men, putting thousands of laps behind us. The repetitious and monotonous routines of our past
do
accrue into Something Big, with time and patience and a whole lot of luck.
Mary Kay Blakely
It was a major event, moving into our first house, a cracker-box rambler in the suburbs south of Minneapolis. What an adventure to look out our very own living room window at our very own driveway, our very own front yard with lush green grass—a heady experience for a young married couple expecting their first child. What a change from the apartment living we were used to.
The back yard had not yet been sodded, but I assumed the builder would be coming soon to finish the landscaping. Wrong. So excited about moving into my new house, I neglected to read the fine print where the builder contracted to sod only the front, leaving the back yard full of weeds and clumps of dirt.
In late October, we moved in, one month before our first son made his appearance during a Thanksgiving Day snowstorm. The backyard dirt disappeared under a foot of snow, and the frozen chunks looked like puffy marshmallows in a fairytale landscape.
When spring came, the snow melted, and little by little, as the budget permitted, we bought rolls of sod and covered the back yard area that had become a mud hole when it rained and a dust bowl when it didn’t. The money ran out before the yard did, and we never did finish the last ten foot strip running across the back of the lot.
No matter. It would be a perfect place for my very own garden, a place to get on my knees and commune with God while I planted stunning arrays of beautiful flowers—a far cry from the pathetic little pansy plots in our apartment window box.
Alas, being a city kid with a mother whose garden belonged to her alone, I knew nothing about growing flowers like those pictured in seed catalogs. I couldn’t even tell the flowers from the weeds. Finally, I decided if it looked healthy, prosperous and happy to be there, it must be a weed.
In time, having a back yard full of weeds and just a few struggling petunias seemed not so important as enthusiasm slipped away and one son was joined by another. Two little boys, growing too fast out of babyhood into toddler-hood, then into noisy, tumbleweed boyhood.
My garden turned into a playground—for all the kids in the neighborhood; Timmy from up the street, Eddie and Debbie from across the back yard, Mark, Carol and Gary from the house on the corner, plus others who just wandered in. We dubbed it the “Kiddie Garden,” the only place, it seemed, where kids could dig holes, build play houses and make noise—a place to fool around, get dirty and just be kids.
When I looked out the kitchen window at my “garden” I never did see the panorama of flowers I envisioned when we first moved in. I saw instead, perpetual motion from dirt streaked faces peering out over the tops of T Shirts, pre-school engineers building roads and bridges for their toy trucks. I saw mounded dirt pile forts, and pint-sized warriors waging noisy battles back and forth, trying to capture enemy flags, (sticks in the ground with rags tied at the top.) There were only two rules in the kiddie garden— all holes had to be filled back up by the end of the day, and no fighting. Anyone who couldn’t get along had to go home.