Notes from a Mom 2 sons

This is a good evening. We're all on the bed. My 8 year old son, Josh and I are reading our individual Reader's Digest (his 11 year-old brother, Nate is helping him with the big words). I'm eating a salad which Nate, my pernickety eater, tries some of  - "I'm open to new things, Mom!"  Meanwhile he's finishing a half glass of milk - another new thing for him. Josh offers to take my salad container to the kitchen because "I want to be a GENTLEMAN!" (His brother teases him that he will never be a "gentle man"). As he leaves, I lay back on the bed that was made up 30 minutes earlier by Josh & I ("ⁿRemember you showed me how to do it, Mom!"). Right now, at this moment, I'm feeling VERY blessed.

He Gone. | CindyBeall.com

He Gone.

July 21, 2014 in Motherhood with 1 Comment

This one.

Noah Christopher Beall.



He took my heart over 15 years ago. He smelled sweet even after he spit up. He smiled with love in his eyes for me and thought I was the cat’s meow. He didn’t want me to leave the room. He always told me he loved me. 

Now he stands over three inches taller than me and his sweet smell has since departed his tall, thin body. His introverted personality needs to retreat to his bedroom away from his extroverted mother and her  “I just want to hear about your day” conversations.  I am 187% certain that I annoy him on a daily basis but at the same time, he still calls me Momma.

(When he calls me Momma, my heart warms and my answers will almost always be yes. I pray he always calls me Momma. But don’t tell him because then he might use it against me and I will be forced to give in. Sigh.)

In 36 days he will obtain his learner’s permit for driving which means HE WILL BE DOING THE DRIVING and his mother will have to remain calm because HE WILL BE DOING THE DRIVING so pray that his mother’s already elevated cholesterol levels do not elevate some more because HE WILL BE DOING THE DRIVING. 

(He’s actually a really solid and cautious driver. Praise you, Jesus, and Glory to God in the highest. Peace on earth and good will to men, amen.)

I am still not finished with lessons that I still need to learn as his mom. And goodness me, I have more sons coming up to keep practicing. Since I don’t really know how to raise teenage girls, this is mostly for moms of boys. But, you moms of girls, maybe it will help you, too. Here’s what I have learned along the way and am trying to implement daily:

1. Don’t say much. He’s probably tuning you out after a dozen words anyway.
2. Smile more than you frown. I don’t do this enough but I’m trying.
3. Don’t turn everything into a lecture. Hashtag guilty.
4. Laugh with him as much as possible. This has saved our relationship.
5. Do not be offended. I repeat, DO NOT BE OFFENDED if he wants to talk to his dad more than you. AT LEAST HE IS STILL TALKING.

I would love to tell you that parenting gets easier. The toddler years can be tiresome because you tend to repeat the same things over and over and over again to your little one because they either flat out disobey you, forget what you said or just can’t reason yet. I’m afraid that remains the same in the teenage years. You still have to repeat the same things over and over and over again to your hairy-legged young man. Because he’s doing what he is supposed to be doing. 

He is fleeing the nest.

And good grief, mercy and grace, it is painful. Girls may have more drama but boys? Boys know how to break their momma’s heart.

Doesn’t he know that he has my heart and when he hurts, I hurt? Doesn’t he know that I know what’s best for him? Doesn’t he know that I have 28 more years of experience on this earth and he would do well to listen to me? And doesn’t he know that when he makes poor decisions, I want to run in with my super-heroine mentality and save the day? 

(Somebody get my cape.)

But he doesn’t know. Because he is not me. He is my son. He is not a parent. He is the almost grown child. He isn’t supposed to know yet. But he will know the moment he holds his firstborn child in his arms. And then, THEN, it will all come to him and he will say, “My momma wasn’t crazy after all.” And he will throw me a party.

Until then, I keep the crazy label. 

That’s okay. 



Clearly, he loves pictures with his mother.

(And I promise you he will hate that I wrote this blog post about him. So, don’t mention it, mkay?)

God ROCKS!

From my son

Not Seventeen

Today, while waiting in the reception area at my salon, I stumbled into a Seventeen Magazine. It's been ages since I'd seen, much less read, one and I picked it up with some degree of interest. I remembered how this was my "must-read" as a teenager.  I would save up my lunch money to be able to buy a copy (Tiger Beat was a distant second. Those I'd borrow).

 As I thumbed through the magazine, various articles caught my eye. The featured article was how to deal with your friend(s) no longer being that into you. That took me back.  I remembered how soul-crushing that was as a teenager – “She was my best friend! Who do I talk to now?". There was another article that addressed the questions surrounding teenage sex which even spoke of oral sex. And, even as I lowered my raised eyebrows, I admitted to myself that teens needed that kind of frank discussion rather than half-truths garnered from friends and self-serving "partners".

 However, the thing that surprised me the most was my appreciation of the fashion. I wondered if I was perhaps channelling Betsey Johnson, the preternaturally youthful, septuagenarian fashion designer known for her "over-the-top" designs (and her cartwheels at the end of her fashion shows). The clothes in the magazine were fresh and fun! The shoes (I have a weakness for fashion forward shoes) were fabulous – covering the gamut from conservative to outlandish. I could see myself actually wearing some of those items in a heartbeat.  And that’s the funny thing. Back when I was a teenager, even though I was a smaller dress size then than I am now, I would never consider wearing ANY of that. I was SO self-conscious about being overweight and not cute (it didn’t help that I wore glasses and my hair was FAR from being “cool”).

So what happened in the decades since my teens? I believe, quite frankly, I’ve grown into myself. I’ve learned that worrying, wondering what others think of you, and my trying to fit into their self-serving boxes, isn’t worth it. My friends laugh when, at each birthday, I say it’s my 25^th birthday (On my last birthday, one friend joked that based on my “current age”, we met at UWI when I was minus two years-old. LOL). But for me, it’s not a case of trying to seem young (seriously – I can’t pass for 25 AT ALL). Rather, it’s a case of still being in that phase of life beyond the debilitating self-consciousness of my teen years and the generally, incapacitating “afraid-to-try-something-new” of the middle years. More Magazine speaks of Second Acts and Reinventing Yourself. I prefer to think of what I’m doing now as shucking the husk of who I’m supposed to be and engaging me.

I’m rather happy I ran into that copy of Seventeen Magazine today. It gave me a chance to revisit a time I’d forgotten and see how well I’d developed. It gave me a chance to say, truthfully to myself, “You’ve come a LONG way, baby”

Thankful

So I'm watching an old episode of "8 Simple Rules" (not a show I've watched) and it happens to be the episode after John Ritter's death. In the midst of it, Bear Esq comes in to ask for my help in opening a cereal box, and I find myself tearing up. After watching this TV family deal with the death of a parent, I'm VERY grateful to be blessed with another year with my 3 bears AND another year with BOTH my parents.