Motherhood 2.0

For as long as I’ve parented (lo these nearly 26 years) I have come to expect the unexpected. My mainstay is constant communication, total honesty, and mutual respect. Children are far more resilient in the arena of respect than many adults think. They want it and crave it and ache to have it, but it’s a two-way street that’s easier to come by than I first imagined. We’ve re-adjusted and re-arranged some things in our family to make room for Grant and Kaylee but what we’ve gotten in return from them is tenfold what we’ve put into them. In negotiating and making our requests known we have found that our non-negotiable items have been respected. For instance, Kaylee must finish school and we’ve taken her for registration so she can finish. I’m sure it wasn’t high on her list of things to comply with but she is so eager to please us and is moldable enough that we are pleasantly surprised by her presence.

Grant, in his own right, is equally eager to please and pitch in on household chores. But he’s also a musician who has brought even more music into our home. When he came to us he had sold all of his guitars and that made The Cuban sad because he knows how important playing guitar is for him so we went out last weekend and bought him a new one. He played for hours and hours and never set it down except when it was time to eat a meal. Even when he was watching his dad bake bread and The Cuban told him to come watch so he could teach him this skill, Grant walked over with his guitar in his hand and continued playing.

I updated my blog last week after some coding errors occurred and am trying out this new gallery photo. And, oops! I see that one of the images linked twice, but I’m not fixing it right now. 

Even with all of the changes, my own children are rolling with it well. Morgan has a part-time job and loves all the newness of what it brings and he has maintained straight A’s this school year. I don’t fear that any of that will change, but he is growing up, too, and finding his way. I felt really lucky to be able to take Mason out shopping with me at JC Penney today to support Ellen DeGeneres and the unfair attack she got from a bunch of truly ignorant people. Every time we tried something on while shopping we would say, “I think gay people would approve of this. Don’t you?” and it gave us some special time one-on-one today. This isn’t newness is motherhood, but it is nonetheless special and mandatory. I count myself lucky to have spent time alone with each of the four kids this week. If I had done this when they were younger I’m sure I would have experienced that young mother fatigue, but all these teenagers energize me.

Grant and Kaylee also enjoy how much we’ve extended room for them in both the physical house and the more emotional home. They were happy to make it to The Wall (even though we’ve had both of The Cuban’s sons on it already) and helped us re-arrange the pictures. The Cuban actually came up with this idea and found plate displays at the store that he thought would be great for the many photographs I take. He nailed four of them to the wall and then cut boards, painted them, and placed an additional shelf where more pictures could rest. When our plaque came in the mail yesterday he nailed it to the wall right in the center. It’s our favorite DIY project lately because we can remove pictures and re-arrange them however we want. When our new additions came to us, we simply shifted some around to make space for them.

If that’s not a metaphor for how we’re living our lives in this family right now, I don’t know what is.

We are just really happy to be doing it.