Happy Sweet 16th, sweet boy. You are now taller than me and your dad. You can pick me up. You have a job. You built a motorized bike. You are a Boy Scout (sort of -- I think you're mainly in it for the campouts and other trips). There's too much catching up for me to appropriately address all 3 of the years that have gone by without me writing. I'm sorry. These past 3 years have been hard for me. Thank you for being there for me, for supporting me the best way you knew how. Hopefully, someday we can sit down and have an adult conversation about it all. Until then, I'm grateful you are my son. And anyway ... this is about YOU, not me. (That's a hard concept for me, even as a grownup mother of two.)Now that baseball is finished, your biggest hobby is fishing and biking. You've actually made two motorbikes at this point -- one you sold (and then agonized over because you were worried it might stop working and the guy might come back and blame you, and the other is still with us, in all its noisy glory). You ride it to your job and to your friends' homes. Sometimes I suspect that you ride it up and down the block to annoy everyone. Except I think I'm the only one who's really annoyed. The fishing obsession is so fun to watch. A few months ago, you got out each of your baits and explained them to me. I listened patiently, though I had no clue what was really happening. I just loved listening to you talk.
Sometimes at night, usually pretty late, you tell me you have anxiety. I go into your room, and we talk. You have no idea how much that means to me, John-John -- that you trust me, that you rely on me, that we talk. I have heard from a lot of other moms that teenage boys just. don't. talk. ever. But you're different -- you're sensitive, and you recognize that you need someone else to share the burden with. This is a key life skill, and I hope you continue to hone it as you get older and move away from us. I know it won't always be me that you turn to, so I cherish the time that's mine now. I know that eventually, you will stop talking to me just like you stopped asking me to rub your back every night. I waited all through middle school for it to stop, you dragged it out, but finally, now, it's gone. So, I recognize fleeting moments quite easily now.
Since you are 16, everything sort of seems like a fleeting moment. Only two years until you can technically move out and get your own apartment ... something you have wanted to do for nearly a decade. I'll never forget the day you came home from a playdate and said, "Dad, why can't me and Quinn and Cohen just get our own place?" You were 8. Below I've written 16 of your fleeting characteristics that I'd like to capture:
- Your gullibility
- Your patience with chores (NOT)
- Your gorgeous hair
- Your newly-hairy legs (and armpits)
- Your desire to look nice (you even wear collared shirts without me asking)
- Your 3 showers a day to ensure you don't stink
- Your stink
- Your fixation with stuff that will prevent you from stinking (primarily Axe products)
- Your honesty after you've lied
- Your understanding nature about our limits on video games (NOT)
- Your independence when it comes to academics
- Your ability to feed yourself
- Your penchant for sleeping until noon (if we let you)
- Your love of shoe technology (Beckers are weird, honey, you got it honest)
- Your adoration of George's "poodle gluteals"
- Your marvelous mechanical mind
All my best love,
Mom
No comments:
Post a Comment