This one goes to eleven

Bobby turned 11 today. Like most parents of kids this age, my constant worry is, when does “it” start happening - the attitude, the rebellion, the return to the toddler years of frustration and misery? Right now Bobby is a sweet, obedient boy. Are the hormones that will make him into a snotty terror currently poised and waiting to surge, like bats in a sewer pipe at sundown? 

OR will our kids be different, because we actually listen to them, don’t make stupid and arbitrary rules just because we can, and we’ve fostered an environment of mutual respect and kindness? I think of myself at his age, alone in a studio apartment with an unreliable mother who three years later would set me off (for the most part) on my own, then when I stayed out all night in Washington Square Park at fourteen would attempt to set some rules and boundaries from a distance, which I found patently ridiculous and which I demonstrated by walking away from her when she was mid-sentence on a New York street, my men’s 1950’s gabardine jacket flapping in the wind. I still bristle at people attempting to tell me what to do. Yet another reason I consider myself unemployable. But I digress.

Bobby is eleven, which means puberty is around the corner, which means an end forever to certain things - his sweet little falsetto of a singing voice, his being shorter than me, his clear skin (sorry, kid, it happens to the best of us - maybe there are better treatments now than in the 80s), his being relatively odor-free. I dread the next phases, but I welcome them, too. I’m interested to see what kind of a person he becomes, what hobbies and interests he gravitates towards as he moves beyond elementary school, what his first relationships will look like. 

I’ve accepted that for several years I will live in this tiny house with three sweating, stinking men who break things just by looking at them and fill my fridge with dead animals and make loud, sudden noises. This is rapidly becoming my reality, and will remain as such until about 2032. And then just like that my house and I will return to our original state. The male energy will fade away as they move on and out. It’s odd to think about, but this whole raising kids thing is only temporary, and for me, in its entirety, will still only take half the time my life leading up to having children took. To say this time with them is just a blip isn’t all that inaccurate.

And so we plot the vacations and lean in to the school involvement and try to be present mentally and physically as much as we can, while also leaving space for our inadequacies and insufficiencies, knowing that these kids will still love us fiercely even as we fiercely loved our own inadequate parents whether they deserved it or not.