KIDS: Great Expectations

     It was incredible to me that the nurses at the hospital where our first child was born laid that baby in my arms and let me walk out the door with him. I'd walked into the hospital fat, unable to roll over in bed without physically carrying my stomach with me; I came out thin and able to sleep on my stomach again. As if that weren't special enough, they let us keep a tiny, brand-new human being for our very own--and we didn't even need a permit.
     I thought I knew this human being. I'd toted him around with me for nine months and I not only knew him intimately, I had his whole life planned out for him. I knew his personality and what foods he liked and what colors and what games and what toys. I had his wife pretty well settled on. I would have said I didn't know who she would be but deep inside I must have--because it always astonished me when I found out I was wrong.
     The next 20 years consisted of unlearning all that. Growing up, I found out, means constantly surprising us parents with who our child is--in contrast to who we expected him to be. It is the unfolding of reality to correct suppositions and assumptions.
     His first tentative reaching for a toy convinced us he would be right-handed. We were wrong. He showed an early interest in taking things apart and in playing with toy cars and trucks, but he turned out not a bit mechanically-inclined. Just last week he told us his transmission was going out and he needed to shop for a new car to get to work. Turned out he needed $5 worth of transmission fluid.
     It was because he did so little at first, contracting all over in pleasure when we bent over him or batting spasmodically at the mobile above his head, that our imaginations could invest so much into the vacuum. Growing up would be disengaging, one by one, those attitudes and interests and dreams we had projected into his mind. It wasn't until I made a chocolate cake for Ben's 7th birthday that I found out he doesn't like chocolate. I hadn't been listening because I thought I already knew.
     Not that we were disappointed in him. Not at all. We liked who it turned out he really was.
     But our biggest assumption was that there there would be equal and mutual respect, response and rewards, right from the beginning. We had given him life, sustenance and constant attention to the point of worship--and he, in turn, would smile for Grandma, stay sweet-smelling through nursery and go to sleep when we put him to bed. Right?
     Except nobody told him there were rules. Sometimes he threw up on Grandma, wet through everything we'd brought to the nursery to change him into and stayed up crying past our bedtime. Where was the gratitude? Where was the justice?
     We want them to perform, like trick dogs. We want them to be seen as clever, so we will seem clever. Some Christmas he will double up all the relatives in laughter, even the relatives from Seattle who are meeting him for the first time, and we will expand with new worth, because he is ours. On another day, he will stand mute on a stage where he is supposed to deliver three words, as a star or a starfish or an innkeeper--and his failure will be our acute failure, because he is ours. We identify with them as with nothing else we possess--and yet we do not possess them.
     They are ours but not by ownership. They are ours by stewardship. Though their achievements and agonies will be ours through their whole lives, we must let the credit or the blame, increasingly, be theirs. We must at least break free and be ourselves. We cannot live their lives for them.
     So we give them life and love and food and tenderness and train them up in the way they should go. If we're lucky, they won't throw up on us. And if we let them, they may rise up and call us blessed.
     Which we will, in fact, be.
     Until then, respites and rewards won't come on cue. He will sleep through the visit to the neighbors whom you wanted desperately to have see him sparkle with delighted coos and grins. He will require you to leave a movie you've waited all year to see. No bigger than a six-pack, he can draw like gravity every woman in a room, create longing or envy in the unmarried, pain in the infertile, gratitude in the menopausal ("Glad it's not me"). He can irritate every single patron of a restaurant or airplane and never know his own power.
     After you try all weekend to make him repeat his first syllables, he will finally cooperate and say "Daddy" when Daddy has flown to Denver for the week. He will thrill your heart with the word "Mommy" and you'll find him talking to the dog.
     No, respites and rewards will catch you off guard, when you're least expecting them, when you've given up hoping for them. They will start as one of those moments that freeze the blood in your veins, a cry in the dead of night. You will stumble down a cold passageway to find him looking up at you bright-eyed, not wet, not fussy, not hungry, asking nothing of you. Just wide awake and wriggling with life.
     You will pick him up and rock him gently, though you are half-asleep, and the moonlight outside the window will play peekaboo with you both through the trees. His downy head will be smooth against your cheek and he will fall asleep with his fist in his mouth. You will sit awake and thank God for this most exasperating, unpredictable package and you will try to guess who God is unfolding him to be.
     But he will still surprise you.
     Someday you may look up at him, dressed in a tuxedo, next to a girl blushing in pink gauze and wonder, Can this be the bald, toothless kid who used to gum my arm?
     You will see him again as the little kid swinging a lunchbox as he comes up the sidewalk from the first day of kindergarten, a note from his teacher pinned to the front of his striped shirt. This is the boy who demonstrated on a Christian TV show how he assembled a robot from an erector set. This is the kid who wrote a letter to the "Tuth Fare" (now framed on your kitchen wall), because he had lost his "tuth" and was afraid he wouldn't be compensated for it.
     This is the 14-year old whose "knock-knock" jokes and shrill whistle nearly drove you to distraction. This is the absent-minded, exasperating, inquisitive, marvelous little being who took your presence and your love for granted--and then, out of nowhere, reached up to give you a hug and whisper, "I wouldn't trade you for a million diamonds."
     You stand on tiptoe now to kiss his jaw and you whisper, "I wouldn't trade you for a million diamonds."
     And he says, "Mom, please, you're embarrassing me!"