There have been many times over the years that I wondered how my kids ever survived my mothering. While I am a great engineer, the maternal domestic gene seemed a bit lacking. For example, 40 years ago you couldn't go to Walmart and pick up a First Response kit to see if you were pregnant. You had to pee in a jar and take it to the doctor's office to be sent off to the lab for analysis. Well the only empty jar I had at home was a dill pickle jar. I anxiously waited for the call back from the doctor's office, but when I talked to the nurse, she said they couldn't tell if I was pregnant or not. The results had been "confusing." I guess I should have washed out the jar a little better after eating the last pickle.
We also didn't have sonograms 40 years ago, so the doctor's estimate for a due date was usually more of an educated guess. All my co-workers started a baby pool to see who could guess the actual date (the doctor had predicted July 30). One of my co-workers guessed August 9th, which I thought was totally ridiculous. After 10 frustratingly long, hot days (having a baby in the middle of the summer is not the most comfortable), it turned out my co-worker was right. Of course, in my opinion, Brian was definitely "overdue," since he was bigger than any of the other babies in the nursery.
For a while I thought I would be a stay-at-home mom, but that lasted about 5 months. Brian went off to Apple pre-school and I enrolled at Kansas State. From the get-go, Brian was every teacher's favorite student. He was bright, happy, and extremely polite. He loved to participate in school plays, something that always amazed me, since his parents don't have a dramatic bone in their body (unless you count watching movies on Netflix).
When Brian turned 5, he went off to kindergarten. At that time, the school was only a couple blocks away - plenty close enough for him to walk. The first day, he went off "on his own" with me following behind like James Bond hiding behind the neighbor's bushes. After a couple weeks, he came home wanting to ride his bike over to a friend's house who lived in the next block. I figured he'd had enough practice going back and forth to school, so I let him go off on his own (literally this time). About an hour later, I got a call from a little old lady who lived about 3 streets over saying that Brian had knocked on her door, completely lost in how to get back home. To this day, he doesn't seem to be as keen on traveling away from home as his sister.
When Brian turned 7, he joined the Cub Scouts. Being the control freak that I am, I became the Den Leader along with another mother from his class. Let me tell you, being a scout leader for boys is totally different than being a leader for girls. Boys have no patience with arts & crafts projects; they mostly want to run and scream. So my friend and I invented a game - something about crossing a river. We would send the boys down to the basement to play while we stayed upstairs and opened up a bottle of wine. The boys might not have earned many badges, but I think they had more fun than making birdhouses out of pinecones.
In the summers, my mom would take the cousins to the lake for a week. They would swim, play games, and do some craft projects (she was better at it than me). My sister and I were never invited, but Bruce and I usually took advantage of the opportunity to go off on our own vacation. One summer, I took the kids to Florida, since they liked the water so much (believe it or not, we drove). Along the way, we stopped at a roadside park for a picnic, and a little bird flew onto the table. We thought it was so cute that we threw it a crumb from one of our graham crackers. Suddenly that little bird started screeching and cawing, and about a hundred birds swooped down on us. It was like being attacked by the birds in an Alfred Hitchcock movie. We threw the rest of the graham crackers at the birds and ran for the car. I can see why they put those signs up in national parks saying "don't feed the wildlife."
When Brian turned 10, we moved into an old mansion in the Central West End. I'm not sure if raising kids in a falling down rooming house was a good idea or not, but I like to think that it might have helped get Brian into MIT when he applied to college. After all, how many admissions officers get to read about "growing up in a house without walls?"
When Brian was in 8th grade, his math teacher took a group of kids to the MathCounts contest. Brian was always really good at math, but I never realized how good until he captured 1st prize in that contest. That enabled him to move up to the regional contest at the university and compete against kids from all over the state. My dad told him, "if you win this contest, I'll give you $100." When they called Brian's name, my dad pulled out his wallet and handed over a hundred-dollar bill. That was a pretty good payout for a kid in 1992.
Brian has always been a pretty independent kid with his own ideas. After college, he ended up moving to Seattle - the rainiest city in the country and the last place I would ever choose to live, but he seems to enjoy it. And he likes cats, which totally surprises me, since we always had a dog around when he was growing up.
But I'll have to say, in spite of my mothering, I think he turned out to be a pretty good kid (he'll always be my precious little boy). I wish him the happiest 40th birthday and I can't wait to see what the next 40 birthdays will bring. I just don't want to get any older along with him. 🙋
