Letting Go

Tomorrow morning I am doing something I have dreaded for years.  I am driving my son to the Department of Motor Vehicles to get his driver’s permit.  For years I looked at this day as the beginning of his driving awayfrom me.  I worried that it would be hard to see him growing up.  Instead I have come to realize that I have spent his whole life helping him to have a happy life.  I have spent every day guiding him and watching him become the young man that he is.  It’s funny the things we will do for our children and how simple it all begins.

When my son was just over two months old, we were having a lazy morning in bed, when I lifted him up above my face and wiggled his tiny little body and he laughed.  It was the first time he had laughed.  It was such an unexpected sound I almost dropped him.  After I recovered from the shock, I spent the rest of the day trying to get him to do it again.  When he did, it was the best sound I had ever heard.  But it was more than that.  Babies amaze me.  They don’t laugh with just their voices and their facial expressions.  They laugh with their whole body.  I can picture the next laughs as clearly as I can anything in this room right now.  He was lying in his baby bath, butt naked and his whole body exploded with each burst of laughter.

Before that day, I knew how much I loved him and in theory I knew I would do anything for this tiny baby from the moment he was born but until that day, I didn’t realize that that anything extended to shaking my head vigorously to and fro, over and over again just to watch him laugh.  My head ached for days but it didn’t matter if that is what it took to make him happy.

So, he is growing up.  He is becoming more and more independent.  And instead of dreading each step, I have started looking for ways to help him to enjoy each moment.  Instead of worrying about him driving away from me, I now look forward to the hours we will be spending in the car over the next few months while he learns to drive.  I know this means he will one day drive away from me and find his own life somewhere else but now I am excited by the prospects.  I look forward to watching what was my happy baby become a happy young man.

Raising a Foodie

My fifteen year old son has a gift.  Well, maybe not a gift but a talent.  Okay, still not sure that is the name for it either but he can do this really cool thing that I would like to take credit for but can’t.

Every afternoon, the second he walks in the house he takes one deep sniff of the air and comments on what’s for dinner.  When he first developed this talent, he could identify the easy things – sautéed garlic and onions or the sting that chipotle peppers left in the air.  But his talent has increased over the years.  Lately, it has become a game we play together.  I start cooking an hour or two before he gets home and then wait for his response as he arrives home from school.

“Are you roasting red peppers,” he will ask before he has even disposed of his backpack.  “Are we having sausage and pepper penne?”

Last week, I thought I might stump him by making something we haven’t had in a while, Jamie Oliver’s Andy the Gasman’s Stew.  There are so many pungent flavors in this one and it cooks for so long that I thought I might have finally found the one that would trip him up.  But there was no hesitation.

“Do I smell oranges and rosemary?”  He immediately asked.  When he picked those two out of the air I knew he had won our little game.

I have raised a foodie and for that I can take only partial credit.  The truth is I would still be making spaghetti with jarred sauce or the chili off of the back of the tomato cans if   we hadn’t moved to England and discovered The Naked Chef.  Though Americans have adopted several British shows recently, the BBC’s programming leaves much to be desired.  Because of this dearth of interesting television, I was forced to watch The Naked Chef as I sat knitting in the evening.  Instead of the punishment I expected this to be, I soon found myself sitting my knitting aside and watching Jamie Oliver make cooking look easy.

Slowly, I worked up the nerve to attempt some of the easier recipes, side dishes mostly.  After finding that I could cook these with little effort I decided to try the more complicated dishes.  I bought the cookbooks and started making the curries and stews and even the roasts.  And I discovered that it was as easy as Jamie had made it out to be – so easy that my kids could do it.

Over the years I have taught my children to cook with the aid of Jamie Oliver’s cookbooks but more importantly with the biggest lesson I learned from The Naked Chef – cooking doesn’t have to be hard.  If you love good food and appreciate good ingredients, there is a joy to be found, not just in sitting down to a good dinner, but in preparing it as well.

This afternoon as I was baking oatmeal cookies, my three year old son came into the kitchen and asked what I was doing.  “Baking cookies,” I answered.  In the tradition that has been established in our house, he walked over to the island, grabbed a stool and scooted it over to the mixer.  He was prepared to be involved in the baking.  Right now, he can identify the flour, sugar and butter.  He knows how to turn on the mixer and drop the dough on a cookie sheet.  But the my favorite thing he learns in my kitchen is a love for cooking and for healthy, homemade food.

The Gift

It’s the thought that counts. The best gifts are from the heart.  We’ve heard these sayings for most of our lives and for the most part we believe them.  But isn’t there always a small part of us that is more cynical than that?  Usually, it is in the giving that we feel this way.  I know that I question the gifts I am giving each Christmas.  Did I spend enough?  Is it nice enough?  Will they like it?  But sometimes it is in the receiving or the expectations of receiving.

This Christmas though, like a Hallmark special, these sentiments were brought home.  As I was heading out the door to Christmas Eve mass, I decided to check my email, more out of habit than expectation.  But there it was.  A gift from my father.

My father is not an emailer.  Until Christmas Eve, I had received exactly three emails from him in my entire life.  The subject line read simply, Ann Marie Wilson.  There was no body of the letter, just an attachment, again labeled Ann Marie Wilson.  I almost left it sitting, thinking I would call my dad later to make sure he had sent this and that the attachment was not some virus that had been sent using his account.  But something told me to take the chance. Maybe it was the Marie in my name.  No one except my daddy calls me Ann Marie and even he hasn’t used it in years.

So, I opened it and I stood there, in front of my computer on Christmas Eve, tears streaming down my face reading a poem about the love of a father for a daughter.  A poem my father had written for the daughter who he chose to make his own thirty eight years ago.

The thing that struck me most about the poem was not just the love he poured into it.  It wasn’t just the fact that my dad is not a poet or even a writer by profession or nature.  It was the fact that I already knew all of these things he was telling me.  He describes the moment he met me at a bowling alley on his first date with my mother.  I was three.  He asks whether I remember it.  I don’t remember it but I know it is the moment he fell in love with me, because he has told me the story so often over the years.  He always tells it the same way, explaining how he knew I was meant to be his daughter.

He goes on to talk about our life together – his teaching me to ride my bike, the times he pulled splinters out of my fingers and cactus spikes from my toes.  He talks about the tough times with my mother and then our lives after their divorce.  And he talks about giving me away at my wedding.

The point of the poem is to tell me that I am a gift in his life.  I didn’t need a poem to know this.  I have always known that my daddy loved me.  I have always known that, even though he has three children of his own, he has never thought of me as anything less than his daughter.

I wanted to write something about this poem right away but the words were not there.  Two weeks later and the words still escape me.  But I had to try – try to explain how the poem was only part of the gift.  The rest of the gift was the years of having a daddy.  He could have chosen to marry my mom, have his own kids and treat me nicely.    He didn’t have to teach me to ride a bike or read a book.  He didn’t have to love me.  But he did.  And that was the best gift.

Each year, as Christmas approaches I worry over the gifts I give my children.  Will they like them?  Will they think their brother or sister got something better?  Will they understand why I bought the things that I did?  I am sure that my parents did the same thing.  And I am sure I will do the same thing for years to come.  But now, there is a part of me that knows, I mean really knows, that the best gift I give them will always be the love.

The “What If Monster”

We are dealing with monsters these days.  My three year old insists there are monsters around every corner, in the dark bathroom, behind closet doors and under every bed.   I spend a good portion of each day explaining that there is no such thing as monsters, all the while fighting the one who lives under my own bed.

My monster, the “What If Monster” has a way of keeping me awake at night worrying about what might be.  What if Blaise isn’t able to print out his project at school?  What is Meg is doesn’t make the team?  What if the car breaks down?  The “What If Monster” is annoying, but I have learned to deal with him.  I have learned to put my trust in God and go peacefully to sleep.  But his latest trick has put my faith to the test.

The “What If Monster” has learned to morph into the “Its Inevitable Monster.”  This morphing took place simultaneously with my receiving a questionable mammogram result.  The doctor called me a week before Christmas to tell me that there was a mass in my left breast.  My mother is a breast cancer survivor, so I am well aware that a questionable result on a mammogram is not unusual.  I also know that more often than not, a follow up mammogram will come back clean.  But knowing this and believing it are two separate things.  A diagnostic mammogram was scheduled for the Christmas Eve.  I would have to wait a week to find out what the mass was.

The night I received this news I expected the “What If Monster” to pop out from under the bed, keeping me from my much needed sleep.  I expected to toss and turn worrying about the “what if’s” of the situation.  That didn’t happen.  Surprisingly, I fell right to sleep.  Lulled into a false sense of security I slept like a baby for almost two hours only to be woken by the “Its Inevitable Monster.”  This monster didn’t give me what ifs.  Instead, I had already received the bad news.  I had cancer.  I was going to have to tell my children, my husband, my mom and sister.  I was going to have to settle things in my life and prepare to be bald and sick.  Each night for the week leading up to my diagnostic mammogram, I was woken by this monster who made me live with the bad news.  Each night I would find myself holding in the tears and forgetting to turn to God for comfort.

As though this trick was not enough, the morning of Christmas Eve, the “Its Inevitable Monster” woke with me, climbed out of bed and followed me around for the three hours leading up to my appointment.  I went in for the test and the monster grabbed hold of my throat.  The test took only minutes and I found myself sitting in the lobby waiting for the promised results.  All the while the monster sat beside me, whispering the inevitable in my ear. The fear grew and I suddenly, too late, I realized my mistake.  In fighting the monster for the past week, I had given him the power.  Instead of turning to God for comfort, I had taken on the fight myself and I had lost.  I sat there in the lobby and watched the monster lose his grip.  I felt him becoming weaker and realized that I wasn’t winning, God was.  At about the same time, the mammogram technician came in and gave me the all clear.  The mammogram was clean.

Today I sit here knowing the “What If Monster” will come back and hoping that the lessons learned this time will come to me next time.  That I will remember it is not my fight to fight.  That if I give it all over to God there will be comfort.  If I give it all over to God in the beginning the morphing of my monster will not happen.  If I do that, giving it all over to God, I will remember what I tell my three year old.  There is no such thing as monsters.

A Case For Independence

In the seventh grade, my teacher asked, “What character trait do you admire most in a person?”  At the time, I remember trying to figure out the answer she wanted most.  I decided she was looking for honesty, so that was my answer.  Honesty was the trait I admired most in a person.  Ironically, that was a lie.  What I knew then and has remained true all these years is the trait I admire most in people is independence and self-reliance.  I love an independent person.  But even more so, I love an independent child.

People who know me understand that this in the way I have raised my older children.  They see that I have always allowed my children to fall but that I have also always been there to pick them up.  On the other hand, people who only know me in passing might think I am too laid back.  They see me standing back while my child tries to climb a tree, instead of giving them a boost up and they think I am being a bad mom.  I would love to say I am a person who isn’t bothered by what other moms think, but I am not.

Instead, I have to remind myself that I have a plan in parenting.  I am trying to raise my children to take chances, hoping that they will succeed but knowing there will be some failures along the way.  Knowing also that these failures are part of the process.  I could have spent their childhood protecting them from every fall, made sure they were safe every minute of every day, but I let them explore and figure things out own their own, make mistakes and learn from them.

Just before I discovered I was pregnant with Zane I found myself in awe of how well this form of parenting had worked out.  I was so happy with the independence that my children had.  At 10 and 12 they were self-reliant enough to take a third of the grocery list and meet me back at the checkout with their items.  They could not only carry their own luggage when we traveled but they could pack it before the trip as well.  It was so rewarding to watch my parenting theory prove true.

When I discovered I was pregnant with Zane, I told my husband I wanted to raise him exactly the same way.  I wanted to teach him to be independent and self-reliant.  Then he was born.  This tiny little baby was placed in my arms and suddenly I forgot all about independence.  I just wanted to protect him.  Every day I struggle with this urge to protect him from everything.  I catch myself doing things for him instead of letting him learn them himself.  But I look at his older brother and sister and know I need to let go and let him take the same chances.

Yesterday, Zane and I went ice skating for the very first time.  I asked him to stand to the side of the rink and let me go around a couple of times to get my legs back before bringing him out.  He stood there nervously, watching me getting my bearings and suddenly that feeling of protection almost overtook me.  Maybe I shouldn’t bring him out.  He might fall and get hurt.  He might fall and not want to get up again.  He might not want to skate again.  But I fought the urge to protect him.  I went over and took his hand and brought him onto the ice.  For an hour and a half we skated around the rink, Zane spending more time on his butt than his feet but laughing every time he fell.  By the end of our time on the ice, Zane was skating without my help and I, fighting the urge to catch him before every fall, skated ahead of him and made small loops on the ice to come up behind him, giving him just enough space to feel independent without feeling alone.  He would fall and try to pick himself up, and if he could that was great, but if he couldn’t, he knew I was right there to help.

Being a mom is hard.  Sometimes I feel like I have made it harder on myself by trying to instill independence in my children.  It would be so much easier to hold their hands and keep them by my side.  It would be so much easier to not worry about their getting hurt because I was protecting them every step of the way.  But would it be better for them?  I have to believe it wouldn’t.  I choose to believe that the falls and failures they face along the way will, in the end, make them stronger, more independent, more self-reliant people.  I will watch him grow into the person he will become, just as I have with the first two, and hope that I am right.

The Death of a Good Woman

I killed Hannah today. I knew she would have to die.  I had thought about it for months, contemplating her life and planning her death down to the last detail.  This morning as I made my way through the gym, from jumping rope in the empty racquetball court, to lifting weights in the free weight room, I thought through the scene that would be.  How would she react when she realized this was her day to die?  What would her family think afterwards? Does she really have to die?  Does she deserve it?

She definitely did not deserve it.  She had done nothing in life but help other people – her husband, her daughter, her best friend.  The only flaw she had was her inability to put herself first.  Her belief that everybody had to be taken care of and that she could just wait.

For an hour and a half I worked my way through the gym, hoping I could hold my emotions in while I weaved my plan.  This is not one of those things you can talk about.  It has to be kept in, even when the deed is done, allowing it to sit and take seed.

The grieving started as I stood naked in the shower thinking about the first time Hannah met John, the first time she laid eyes on her beautiful newborn child, her surprise friendship with Joyce.  Did I have another choice?  Was there another way?

No, she had to die.  I sat at the computer, eyes closed begging my heart not to break as the words poured out of me and I killed Hannah.  My heart failed me and the tears flowed.  The sobs broke through and I had to watch as the scene played out, as her husband and daughter and best friend lost this woman who had meant so much to each of them for so long.

My writing partner assures me that this is a good thing.  If I am this attached to my main character, it has to be a good thing.  My readers will become attached.  They will love Hannah and cry when she dies.  This doesn’t help my broken heart.  I sit here now wondering how I will get through the rest of my day.  My eyes are red and puffy and I still wonder if I should go back.  Should I bring her back to life, leave my novel unfinished and let her continue to traipse through my mind doing good deeds and making others happy?

I killed sweet, beautiful, generous Hannah today – wife of John, mother of Hannah, best friend of Joyce.  I killed her this morning.  But that was this morning.  This afternoon, I know I will cry again, I will mourn her as the family files through the church and stands by the grave.  I will comfort each of them and help them find meaning in her death and in what she had left behind.

What lies ahead for them, I do not know.  Where they will end up, I have yet to decide.  Tomorrow morning I will head back to the gym, the treadmill this time.  I will run and change their lives, move them forward and hopefully find a happier place for all of us.

I am quickly learning that writing a novel isn’t about putting words on paper.   It is about letting a character run through your heart and become a part of you.  It is about creating a world for your characters and letting them live, giving them reign to decide their own fate and letting it happen even as it breaks your heart.  The words come easy, it’s the letting go that is hard.

Breast Cancer – My Mother’s Story

My mother found the lump in her breast the year before she turned forty.  She screwed up her courage and went to her OB/GYN the next day.  He, of course, sent her for a mammogram.  He told her he would call in a couple

Nineteen Years Later

of days and let her know the results.  When a week went by with no call, she couldn’t handle the strain of the wait any longer.  As a single mom of three kids, she had spent the week wondering how she would support us if she had cancer.  What would happen to her kids if she were to die?  She had imagined the long illness and her death.  She had imagined the last moments spent with her family.  She couldn’t wait a minute longer, so she called the office.  She asked for the results and was told that they only call if the results were positive so if she hadn’t received a call she was clear.  This was the answer she had hoped for and though she would look back on it and say she should have asked to speak to the doctor or a nurse to get a more definite answer, she accepted it.

 

In January of the following year, she first noticed the dimple in her left breast.  She said nothing to me until April.  During that time, it must have weighed on her.  After the scare of the year before, she had placed a card in the shower showing how to do the self exam.  The card had a list of things to look for.  Not just the dreaded lump, but changes in the breast as well, specifically changes such as dimples.  She knew it was a bad sign but couldn’t face it again.  When she did finally call me at college, she told me she was worried, but knew she couldn’t afford another mammogram.  We talked about putting aside twenty dollars a week until she could afford it.  But we both knew she wouldn’t.  She knew she in her heart it would come back positive.  And ignoring it was the best she could do.

In October, I heard that the clinic at the local hospital was offering free mammograms as part of National Breast Cancer Awareness month.  I called my mother and asked her to please go.  She waited until her birthday, October 30^th, before finally getting up the nerve.  The doctor at the clinic called the next day.  Within the week they had confirmed cancer with a biopsy.  We had also been asked to pick up her last mammogram so they could compare the two and see how much it had grown in the past year.  To our horror there was a sealed envelope in the x-ray file addressed to her OB/GYN.  We opened it to find a report from the radiologist to the doctor stating that there was indeed a tumor in her breast and it had attached to the tissue around it making it a clear carcinoma.  The new doctor scheduled a mastectomy for the day before Thanksgiving.

During the mastectomy, they removed 17 lymph nodes.  Eight of the 17 were infected with cancer.  She was told to get her affairs in order.  She would not survive the year.

This weekend, nineteen years after that fateful mammogram, we are celebrating my mother’s 49^th birthday.  She is a true miracle story.  She fought the cancer with everything that she had and she won.

My mother’s story has taught me a few things.  First, get a mammogram, but even more important, don’t just call the doctor for the report, pick up the radiologist’s report and read it.  Second, ignoring the problem will not make it go away.  And third, doctors don’t always have the answers.  When I am in doubt about a doctor’s instructions or prognosis, I ask questions, I express my doubts and I push for myself or my children.  I am my best advocate.  If I don’t ask the question or stand up for myself and my children who will?

For more information on self examination please visit – The American Cancer Society

Putting the Pieces Together

Everybody is on Facebook.  Teenagers use it to keep in touch with their friends on a daily basis.  But, the older Facebook users use it to go back.  The phrase use to be “you can never go back” but Facebook has changed that.  I have several groups of friends on Facebook right now but the two I visit most often are my girlfriends from college and my gang from middle school.

This second group is my going back group. I may have never realized that except that my brother in law was laughing at me for being back in touch with people from middle school.  “Why would you ever want to do that?” Sometimes a remark like this will just roll on by without an answer, but not this time.  This time I thought about it.  Why would I want to be in touch with people I haven’t seen in almost twenty five years? It was an easy question to answer.  My middle school years were a defining time in my life.  Life was great.  I had friends.  A lot of friends and we had fun.

I moved to my middle school in fourth grade and it was not just my first year at the middle school.  It was the first year for the school itself.  The building was finished a month before we moved in.  Many of my friends had been going to school together since kindergarten, but something about the new school made them more accepting of the new girl from the city.  I was poor but so were most of them.  Over the next five years we mished and moshed until we had the right combination of friends in our group.  We were members of the school band, cheerleading squad and basketball team.  Suddenly we weren’t just little kids trying to find our spots.  We had found our places.

Our world was compact.  It existed between those walls.  The summer after eighth grade, I spent in fear of what would lie ahead for us.  What would become of us in high school?  What would be expected?  Already there were signs that friends would change.  Already there were friends experimenting with sex and drugs.  Already there were rumors in our small town of divorce and job loss.

The changes in my life came as a surprise.  My life outside of those middle school walls had always been in upheaval.  My friends saw my mother as a wonderful, cheerful person.  They saw her as the joking, laughing mom that they wished they had.  They saw her when she was in her upswings.  They missed the downswings.  They missed the depression and the angry fits complete with fly swatter beatings.  They were not aware of my dad who was too quiet to be noticed but was like a super hero in my life.  They didn’t know that he was the protector.  The person who took the brunt of my mom’s anger as long as he wasn’t at work.  This was my life outside of middle school.  It had been my life for thirteen years and I assumed it would be my life until I graduated from high school and could get out.

But, I was wrong.  Halfway through my freshman year of high school I began to hear rumors.  To notice how other adults looked at my mother.  I wondered whether our secret had finally gotten out, whether someone had finally connected the dots of my many accidents.  If someone had noticed some wrong in the cheerleader who could get through whole school days and basketball games without hurting herself could show up to school with a black eye caused by her now famous clumsiness.  I kept waiting for the shoe to drop.

When it finally did, I was surprised.  The sin was not that my mom was beating her child.  It was that she was having an affair.  I found this out the day my dad and his shot gun disappeared from our house.  The principal found me and explained what had happened.  They did find my dad and all was fine, but my family was changed forever.  My life was never the same after that day.

We left that year and I lost touch with all of those friends.  The friends who had let me live a normal life six hours a day, five days a week for five years.  After that I was always the girl who couldn’t explain who the man we were living with was without turning bright red in embarrassment.  I was the girl who moved to five different high schools in an effort to escape my mom’s sins.  I was the girl whose home life overshadowed everything else.

My middle school friends were the friends who had let me escape that. They know what became of me and my family because it was a small town, but what they remember is the girl who was happy – the girl who was silly and liked to have fun.  As an adult, that is the girl I am again, but it is nice to put the two pieces together – to welcome friends, who meant so much to me twenty five years ago, back into my life.

With Both Feet

My three year old hates every food that is not pizza, hotdogs or chicken nuggets.  For a mom who loves to cook and has raised two other kids on gourmet foods, this is a nightmare.  No matter how many times I read him Green Eggs and Ham, he refuses to try new things.  It occurs to me though, that this tendency to not only avoid new things but declare a dislike to them must be innate to humans.

My Dad hates to fly.  He has never flown but he hates it.  I have a friend who hates crowds but has never stepped foot outside of his small town to find himself in a crowd.  I live twenty minutes outside of Washington, DC and have met people who have lived their whole life here without once stepping foot in DC.  In one way or the other we all limit ourselves this way.  A limitation I have put on myself?  Cruises.  I know I wouldn’t like a cruise.  I have a list a mile long why this is so.  Yet, I have never set foot on a cruise ship.

I will, once in a great while, get my son to agree to taste something new.  He will pick up the smallest amount of the suspicious food with his fork and touch it to the tip of his tongue shaking his head before it even reaches a taste bud, never giving the flavor a chance.

Grownups do this too. We dip our toes in an experience and form an opinion without giving it a chance instead of jumping in with both feet and immersing ourselves in the experience.  Instead of looking at the situation for what it might offer, we go in with our opinions set and color our experiences with that brush.

Blogger, Katie Leas, over at Tremendous Blondette just showed us all how it should be done.  Several months back she posted a bit about not liking to travel and being afraid to fly.  Recently, she posted a retraction.  Apparently, in the last few months, she has jumped in with both feet.  She has done enough travelling to feel like an expert. But what really came across in her post, especially in the photo captions, was the joy she has found in each new place.

Looking at each of these photos, I wondered how her life will change.  What will be different now that she has seen New York City for the first time, visited Las Vegas and a handful of other cities she had never visited?  Whether those cities changed her I can’t tell you, but I can tell you, from personal experience, that what changes is attitude.

When we jump in with both feet and experience something we thought we didn’t like or thought we would never do, suddenly, anything is possible.  Suddenly the world really is our oyster and we begin to wonder, what else we are missing?  We start looking for the next adventure.  The next new discovery.  Or in Zane’s case the next new and delicious food.

To Text or Not to Text

As we prepared lunch this afternoon my husband asked whether he should make a sandwich for our fifteen year old son.

“I don’t know, text him and ask ,” I said.

“Text him?  Where did he go?”

“He’s in his room upstairs.”

Such is life with the teenager.  I could yell up the stairs for ten minutes before my voice registered in his teenage brain but the slight vibration of his phone gets his attention every time.

My husband recently read an article in the Washington Post about parents who text their teenager as their only means of communications.  I didn’t read the story before he threw the paper out but his take on the subject was that texting as a parental means of communication is a bad thing.  I respectfully disagree.

Several years back a dear friend gave me a bit of advice about raising a teenage son.  She said it is a parent’s responsibility to find ways to relate to their child.  Pay attention when they go on about their video games or the latest argument with a friend on the soccer pitch. Ask them who they had lunch with at school each day.  Even go so far as to listen to their music.  I took this information to heart and have not regretted it for a moment.

The first step in my quest to relate more closely to my son was having him load my iPhone with his music.  I take my iPhone with me on my run and listen carefully to the same music he listens to.  To be sure that I am getting the same music, I borrow his on occasion.  Though Drowning Pool and Avenged Sevenfold may not have been my first choice for my run, I find that for the most part I do enjoy his taste in music.  But, when I don’t enjoy it, when I am offended by it, I tell him.  We talk about it and we discuss whether there is value in it or whether dumping it off of both our systems is in order.  Sometimes, when my argument is convincing, he does just dump it all together.  Sometimes, I find that he is right, it might not be my taste but he can remove it from my iPhone and keep it as part of his personal music library.  Even this small step of give and take has us speaking in a way we might not otherwise.

In addition to music, I decided to take a step toward understanding the sports that he enjoys. I have set up alerts to my phone to remind me when a game is going to start or when someone scores. If he comes home excited about his team winning, I can relate as I have watched the scores fly across my screen throughout the day.  My subscription to ESPN Magazine has us communicating in a completely different way as we fight over who gets the issue first.  Rick Reilly is a favorite for both of us and we could go on for hours with fodder from his latest article.

So, we do communicate in ways other than texting, but texting offers its own special form of communication.  He communicates with his best friends via text the same way I, as a teenager, communicated with mine by phone.  The fact that he will text me puts me a leg up on my mom.  There is no way I would have taken the time to chat with her by phone as a teen.  Facebook and Twitter have both opened new avenues as well.  We share information we may never have thought to share – stories from the news, fan pages for products we both like, even political views.  We discuss things we may have never discussed.

Years ago my sister-in-law told me that the best way to have a real conversation with a teenager is in the car or doing laundry.  If you aren’t sitting face to face, they will have an easier time opening up.  Texting and Facebook are much the same thing.  They give my son an opportunity to open up about things he might otherwise clam up about.  They give him a chance to think about what he is going to say before he says it.  And it works that way for me as well.  There have been several mornings when I have come downstairs to find a book or a lunch still sitting on the table after he has left for school and as I started a snide text message to remind him that this is an inconvenience for me, I realize how it is going to sound and change it to something lighter and less judgmental while still getting the point across.

If texting were our only way of communication I might be concerned but as it is an addition to the lines of communication we have created, I am not.  As it is a language that young people speak fluently, I am glad to be a part of it, to be let into the club and be part of his life in a way that was not available to my parents.  As a parent, it is my responsibility to relate to my son and to create ways in which he can relate to me.  If that is through texting then so be it.