Today my oldest boy is 10 years old. I can't believe it. How can I describe how much joy this child has brought into our lives? We call him our good luck charm because it seems that after he was born, everything fell into place.
It is certainly a journey that I couldn't imagine before I had him, and it's a journey that is so different today than when he was a baby. I used to see families with their children in the 'tween years and think that wouldn't be as fun as when they were babies. But it's much more enjoyable as they get older - the struggles grow, too. Not being able to protect my son, seeing his friends' influence outweigh ours, realizing that there is nothing I can do to make him a popular kid or the leader among his peers (that they have something to say about that), is not easy. It was certainly much easier to dress him in something adorable and ask him to smile.
Now, he has awkward moments and goofy moments. He is silly in that funny way boys have as they figure out how to tell a joke and then practice being un-enthused (oh. cool. -- I hear that a lot); they do that thing where they act like they are nonplussed and unimpressed. There are moments when I want to be able to punish him the way I used to and still punish Wilbur, sitting on the steps and taking a time out. But by the age of 9 and certainly now that he's 10, that just doesn't cut it anymore. The consequences require thoughtful consideration for every infraction, and every infraction can't warrant punishment. If I punished him every time he rolled his eyes at me there would be no 'time in' -- it would all be time out. So, I choose my battles and focus on the heinous deeds; a particularly nasty tone, complete refusals and uncompleted but required tasks (homework). And I try to stay the one he wants to talk to about hurt feelings and disappointments. Someone told me once that with boys you should be doing something alongside them to open up a conversation about feelings and needs - and she was absolutely right. If I'm not looking at him, he'll open up and tell me about the hard time someone is giving him, his first crush on a girl way out of his league (two years older, a 6th grader!), and how he wants to be part of a tougher crowd of boys at school but he's not quite making it.
It's not really something I could imagine 10 years ago as I labored for 36 hours without so much as a Tylenol, asking for street drugs or a sledgehammer. And truthfully, it's better that we don't really know what we're getting ourselves into, what we'll feel, how we'll struggle. You wouldn't have the energy for that journey at the start of the trip, and you'd set yourself up to fail. The only way to do it is the way we have to do it, a day at a time.
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