I stare out the window with tears rolling down my cheeks. Reaching up to touch my mouth there is a stream of saliva that comes with my hand and snot is beginning to run out my nose. I am silently sobbing in the public library and wiping away the tears as I read the article, “No One Ever Taught Me How to Raise a Man” by Tracey Huguley. Tears stop dribbling down for a moment when I look through the window. I notice a street sign; Kirkwood. It is still the popular vein pumping money into the local economy and sending students back onto campus fed and dressed well. I look at the street; 11 years after I was a college student. I see with different eyes and a memory is coming back to me. For a moment and I reach far back into the past. That street pole with the wire and dangling street lamp...I’ve stood there before. Yes, I was in a mob of people that overtook the street. And a young man climbed that very pole. He shimmied right up it while everyone around cheered and whooped and hollered. It was a scene of pure adrenaline after watching our basketball team take a major win. We college kids poured out of houses, dorms, the entire campus and flooded that street when that winning shot was made. I am sitting here, so close to a place where I was a still a child and now I am a parent. I have no idea how to raise a man. I am not even sure how to be a mom of a kindergartner and today, I will become one.
A real sense of fear is reaching into my well-being. Is this normal? Is this every first-time kindergarten mom’s experience? This feeling, that every step has to be chosen wisely...it’s exhausting. If I praise him for knowing something at school, will his intrinsic joy for learning be compromised? If I don’t pack his lunch everyday will his precious gut be forever damaged? Will his teacher snuff out his strong curious nature? Will he become zombified? Brain liquified? Wanting only to read books because he earns points from taking lame computer reading tests in the school library? What if I don’t stop in the right place for the school-drop off? Am I limiting his sense of freedom and choice if I insist on driving him to school instead of getting on the deadly bus that will crash leaving him critically injured because there were no seatbelts, right after some 5th grader shouts profanities at him and makes him feel horrifically inadequate for his choice of backpack?
So I question myself. What IS this all about?
It’s about fear. And control. And the awareness that I really haven’t had much control since he was born, but jeez you don’t have to rub my face in it...Kindie-Kindergarten. Children are going to say they won’t play with him. They’re going to tell him they don’t like his shirt or his backpack or the way he colors or his cookie-cutter peanut butter and jelly sandwiches shaped like the great state of Texas where he was born. And then what? I don’t know what I’ll do when he comes home crying because he is scared to read aloud in front of the class or when his best friend decides he doesn’t want to be friends anymore. What do you do? Hell, I cried on and off for weeks when a friend recently decided she didn’t want to speak to me anymore. How do you heal the ultimate rejection, the rejection of you? Why would I even dream of sending him out there like a loose arrow? My mind circles back to that time before he was born. When we waited, prepared for him, anticipated meeting him, feared for him, and began to realize what an incredible journey we were going to take. How giving birth would teach us things, scary things. One of those things we learned was that each day we have to let go a little more. That first week after he was born I held him bundled in a blanket up to my mom as she stood in my kitchen and I beamed proudly asking, “Can you believe he is mine?” “No. He is not yours.” She said plainly. My face changed immediately and she continued “He doesn’t belong to you.” How did she come to this conclusion? “What do you mean?” Deep inside of me there was a pain. Heat wrapped around my neck and my cheeks flushed. There was some truth she spoke. Damn. She recalled a few words from the poet Khalil Gibran and I brushed them away. I never found the poem. It has crept into my conciousness, this real knowing. I sit with shoulders rocking trying not to draw attention to myself and curve my back over and hunch and write and cry. I remember the poet. And I am in awe of his words.
Children
And a woman who held a babe against her bosom said, 'Speak to us of Children.'
And he said:
Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you, yet they belong not to you.
You may give them your love but not your thoughts.
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.
You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.
The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite, and He bends you with His might that His arrows may go swift and far.
Let your bending in the archer's hand be for gladness;
For even as he loves the arrow that flies, so He loves also the bow that is stable.
Khalil Gibran
I will not be able to protect my child’s soul because it is his and only he can feel it. I will not be able to choose his tough decisions because they are his. I will not be able to keep him from seeing, experiencing, or causing hurt because he is not simply an extension of me. (That is a concept I so easily forget.) But, my heart is full of gladness because he is here. And I love him tremendously.
With gladness and love I will embrace this task of being a parent. I will always forget and hopefully I can remember again the words from this wise man. I will also be driving him to school. At least for the first week.
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