Category Archives: Adolescence

Object of Her Affection

Blowing Kisses

“I just have to tell you something, Mom. I’m really liking boys without their shirts on.” Sydney first confided this secret to her long-time sitter as they walked downtown near campus where the streets buzz with college students and where it’s not uncommon to see packs of bare-chested male runners jogging past. When one particular athlete winked in response to Sydney’s friendly wave, she blew him kisses, with both hands. Yeah, she’s cute. And she knows it.

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Kids Can Change the World or Lisa Goes to Science Camp

Screen Shot 2013-05-22 at 10.37.58 PM 3

We don’t even have to try,

It’s always a good time.

Owl City—Good Time

My memories of 7th grade provoke a visceral response.  Awkward and insecure, I sought acceptance through conformity, applying baby blue crème eye shadow thickly from a lipstick tube, battling my naturally curly hair into something resembling Farrah Fawcett’s, and walking the halls with fake nonchalance, clutching my Partridge Family Trapper Keeper to my chest.  None of it worked. I was unpopular and self-conscious. I think it was actually the worst year of my life. So recently, when the necessity arose to attend 7th grade science camp with Sydney, my thought was, “I wonder if there’s somewhere I can get alcohol within walking distance.” 

I went, not as a chaperone, but as 1:1 support for my special needs daughter; the school could not provide a 24-hour para for an extracurricular activity. If I didn’t go, she couldn’t go. Short of swapping bodies with my 13-year-old daughter, ala Freaky Friday, I lived the life of an early adolescent for three days.

“Are you excited, Syd?!” I asked, as if she hadn’t been telling everyone who’d listen.  Excited was probably not the word I’d use to describe my state of mind, but I steeled myself and climbed aboard the big yellow school bus packed with chattering, giggling girls, their cumulative noise already bouncing off the tin walls of the chassis.  Sydney and I squeezed past arms and legs spilling into the aisle until we reached an empty seat.  “Whoa, It’s hot in here,” I thought, as I clicked my window down, notch by notch.  I wrestled my bag into the seat on the wheel well and anticipated the 90 minute ride ahead. Talking to myself, I said, “You can do this–it’ll be good for the kids,” and with one look at Sydney, I knew there wasn’t a choice.  “Mom, take a picture of us and post it on Facebook,” she said, posing with her friends.

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Leap From the Nest

Where are you going, my little one, little one,
Where are you going, my baby, my own?
Turn around and you’re two, turn around and you’re four,
Turn around and you’re a young girl going out of my door.

Malvina Reynolds and Alan Greene

Autumn is my favorite time of year and there’s nowhere the season is more provincial than in the Midwest. A tangible chill in the morning air softens the heat of summer and signals a coming change.  Seemingly overnight, leaves begin to turn.  Variegated branches hint of color that will soon become rich orange, yellow and red, flaming briefly before falling to the ground and creating nature’s perfect playground for jumping children. The farmer’s market yields a spread of eggplant, pumpkin, corn, squash and apples; not only a visual feast, but a culinary mother lode for comfort foods that fill the house with the tantalizing aromas of savory soups, roasted vegetables, freshly baked bread, and apple pie. Thrushes, sparrows and other song birds nest mid-migration, on their way to warmer climates. The days shorten and the pull of the Earth’s orbit around the sun is felt. My own focus gravitates homeward; summer is over. It’s time to go back to school.

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It’s About the Dance

dancing-in-the-sun

To watch us dance is to hear our heart speak ~ Hopi Tribal Saying

My daughter Sydney is turning 13.  Thirteen.  As in teen-ager.  When she was born with Down syndrome, we couldn’t have known that watching this beautiful creature grow from infancy to adolescence would be astonishing, but considering that ten years ago we nearly lost her to pneumonia, it becomes positively miraculous.  She would have remained forever a cherubic 2½ year old, arrested in toddlerhood, innocent and ­­unchanged.  It causes my chest to constrict painfully when I remember the weeks she spent in the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit, when I realize how close she came to dying.  But, to our great relief, she didn’t.  She stayed with us.  And she’s no longer a baby.  Through preschool and potty-training, through primary school and pre-pubescence, my long-legged, lanky daughter, emerged, poised on the cusp of puberty.  Ready or not, world, here she comes.

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To Everything a Season

Book stack
 
The way I walk I see my mother walking, the feet secure and firm upon the ground.
The way I talk I hear my daughter talking, and hear my mother’s echo in the sound.
The way she thought I find myself now thinking, the generations linking in a firm continuum of mind.
The bridge of immortality I’m walking, the voice before me echoing behind.
by Dorothy Hilliard Moffatt

The hostas are coming up; tiny shoots penetrating the soil and unfurling, the coils of their leaves break the earth in a luscious green array.  The newness of each eruption symbolizes advent, a beginning.   Winter’s end yields to a yawning genesis of pure potentiality; at its origin, the verdant metamorphosis of a living thing is simply breath-taking.  And sensual.  It is the caress of a gossamer breeze across the face; the warmth of sunshine on skin; the lyric birdsong of nest-makers in flight.   It is, too, the delicate scent of a newborn’s hair inhaled, the soft curve of a cheek traced, the exquisite beauty of a child’s form realized.  Senses awaken.  Life, lying dormant, regenerates.  From nothing, something.   This is how it starts—the dawning of spring.  The cycle of a human life.

My Grammy died a few months before Sydney, with a full head of copper hair, was born.  My fiery Irish matriarch of a grandmother called me ‘love,’ drank Olympia beer from the little cans and quoted A.A. Milne.  She was the first person I loved to die (“Don’t say ‘pass away’ when I’m gone, FOR GOD’S SAKE.  I’ll be DEAD!  Say, ‘She died.’”).  I was bereft she wasn’t there to hold her great-granddaughter, but the significance of one life ending and another beginning wasn’t lost on me.  Ancestral generations come full circle and begin again.  I must fade so my children can blossom.

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