sunny with a chance of robins…and teenagers

*not sure why photos aren’t showing up; it’s kind of distracting. Try back later? But I love that you’re here, and love every comment you leave (hint hint). xo

First, the robins came, descending on our crabapple trees like an efficient crew dispatched to pluck every last dangling, winter-shriveled, red orb. Next came the cedar waxwings with their black, comic book hero eye masks and inexplicable yellow-dipped tails, so lovely and uncommon that I wondered how to make up the guest bed of our yard and entice them to stay awhile. By the time the evening grosbeaks showed up, I thought the tree was picked clean, and yet, like the clown car of the vegetative world, the crabapple trees renewed themselves daily. There’s something wondrous about the orchestration of it all; the elegance and simplicity of resources flowing towards needs.

Snowy robin.

In other news, there are apparently teenaged people in the house. Col’s voice just dropped a few octaves, and both kids come home from school requiring an afternoon snack that lasts right into dinner. I find myself saying antiquated things like, “save your appetite for dinner,” while Col growls like a wolf at the kill of his cereal bowl, urging me to back off. And secretly I love all this feeding of children; how I can hand them a plate of cheese and apple slices like a tangible manifestation of my love. Whew.

Where does she keep finding these longer sets of legs to snap on?

Last week Col’s buddy Cedar was here, both of them gulping cereal before soccer practice. I was milling around, always interested to eavesdrop get a sense of who Col is with his adolescent friends, listening in on what’s important in their lives.

Col: I hate it when I pour too much milk in my cereal bowl.

Cedar: Yeah. You want just enough milk so that your cereal floats.

Pause for chewing.

Col: I’m really happy with how my Hero’s Journey comic is coming out for Humanities.

Cedar: You should see mine, it’s so cool. Super Homer Simpson Duck.

Col: I’ve seen it. It doesn’t look like Homer Simpson. Or a Duck.

Pause for unrelated beatboxing.

Col: My comic has ten panels leading up to the Call to Action.

Cedar: That’s so dumb.

Col: Why?

Cedar: Because you should have less, like me.

While they are loading granola into their mouths you can almost smell strange hormonal processes happening. Their bodies must constantly tingle with growth; bones and tendons knitting into larger versions of themselves like little factories operating around the clock. Frontal lobes are scribbling out pathways titled “what’s cool now” and “that’s so dumb” while perhaps other trajectories like “discernment” or “caring over-much” get pruned.

Sometimes we’re all gathered at dinner, chatting and eating, and Col lets out a string of beatboxes, almost as if he’s re-organizing his brain, or issuing a neural placeholder as he moves from “gory comics I wanna draw” into “conversation with parents.” Then he tells us, “I just love our house.” When we press him on details, he looks around and says, “Just, you know, where the bathroom is placed. It’s just perfect.”

Is he meditating? Pausing for a mini growth spurt? Re-routing neural pathways into “family appropriate humor?”

We took a trip to the Sonoran Desert over spring break. These are Rosie’s photos:

And yet, connection is just as important to the tween/teen set as when they were little. This morning Rose e-mailed me from school saying, simply: “I want you to e-mail me.” Fair enough. And when I’m not parenting via food, I like to give Col long back rubs on the couch while we chat about potential summer jobs for him (the other option is to install retractable spikes on the couch). Here, he can unload bits of his mind with me. He tells me he appreciates the friends he can have actual conversations with. “It’s a sort of maturity thing,” he explains (and then the next morning, 35F, takes off for school on his bike without a jacket).

Rose is two feet away, making another batch of slime while sharing her current grievances. And it’s so strangely Pavlovian, how I’m primed to want to respond with my great, logical advice when she’s hunkered down in her amygdala. I can help! says the well-intentioned heroine, Supermom. Yet, if Rose is swamped with jealousy, anxiety, sadness, all my wisdom will land as tangibly and helpfully as if I just responded in French. i.e. this never equates to a good teaching moment. All I can do is meet her where she’s at, surrounding her emotions with love and care while checking to see if she’s ready to move into her upper brain, where she can access choice, logic, planning and empathy.

******

I’ve read two excellent books. Both of them heartbreaking. This is a novel about a Nigerian immigrant family trying to find success on America’s terms, and the pain that fundamentalism can wreak on a teenager’s expression of sexuality. And this non-fiction book was written by an undercover reporter who spent four months working as a guard in a Louisiana prison, and who found the system so inherently inhospitable to anyone’s humanity, it became disturbingly and increasingly more challenging for him to treat the inmates with respect over time. More cheery reading!

Oh, and the kids and I just finished another Carl Hiaasen book. We love how he always provides an adventurous plot through which to show that teenagers are mostly well intentioned and misunderstood and adults are often buffoons doing various levels of damage to the earth and society.

*******

There are a few crabapples left on the trees, and every day a couple robins touch down to wrestle one off with their long beaks. The vultures have returned, and the apricots are at various stages of bursting into bloom. The mornings are cold questions, answered by deliciously warm afternoons. We are harvesting chard from the greenhouse and stealthing it into dinner as we watch from our big windows, life transform, inside and out.

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