kiwords

“Hey, Mom, come look at this,” Tre called. He was working on the computer, doing his keyboarding homework from Monday school. He’s been working hard, and has learned all the letters except Z. I stood behind him, watching him carefully type out a line. I would estimate he’s up to a good ten to twelve words per minute.

“You really are getting better,” I told him. My hands rested lightly on his shoulders, and even though there is little in this world more boring than watching words like, “Mike and Ann were in the store by ten,” slowly scroll across the screen, I stood there. There is less and less he wants to show me in this twelve year old era and so I stood, admiring his typing skills, wondering what happened to the days that always ended with him on my lap, his head tucked right under my chin.

Somehow we have gotten out of sync, this firstborn boy of mine and I. I tend to blame this on him, on his ADOLESCENTNESS that is unrelenting. The things he can argue with me about…the things he HAS to argue with me about…it’s unbelievable. At least to me. I’m used to him being Tre, the dependable one, the one who is ok, the easy one who wants us all to be happy. And these days? He’d much rather be right. Scratch that, he IS right, and he wants us all to know it in NO uncertain terms.

The thing is, our conflict is as much about my surprise at his attitude as it is about his attitude. I don’t understand it, I don’t know how to talk to him, and I want him to go back to being the kid I knew. I want him to just LISTEN to me, with the same basic assumption he used to have, that Mom probably knows. Instead we argue, each bewildered at the other’s refusal to understand. I am sometimes harsh and angry and walk away, hating my feebleness in this new land

I hear myself telling people, often, the story of when Tre turned two. How he stood up in his high chair one day, and when I told him to sit down, or I would take away his lunch, he glared at me and said in a fiercely piping little voice, “You will NOT.” And I was shocked and hurt and ha ha ha, because he was just turning two, like every perfect firstborn child has before him.

I laugh at myself now, but I can still feel the wrench there was, like a physical tearing in my chest, when I realize he was growing away from me.

I know it’s good, it’s normal and right that he detach in this way. He’s finding his own voice, spreading his wings, blah blah blah.

I looked at him, my fingertips on his shoulders. I studied the whorl of hair at the crown of his head, and remembered when it was drawn in the medium of misty fine baby hair. He painstakingly typed out a line, then two, and turned to grin at me.

“Not bad, huh?”

“Not bad at all. You’re doing just fine.”