The 19yo is home from college for another few days; he has a plane ticket to another city, where he will meet a friend, see the sights, and then drive back to school.
Most of his break between semesters was filled up with our usual long car trip back to Ohio to stay with Mark's parents. I imagine there's more than a little culture shock involved when you go straight from your five-guys apartment with your own bedroom, to folding your long legs into the minivan with six other people for an eight-hour trip. I think we had a good Christmas, though, all together; the little boys are thrilled to have him home, and the teenagers are pleased to have another companion. Sunday he suggested we all go skiing at the local hill, and he spent most of the time partnered with the 9yo, practicing whirlybirds on the easy slopes.
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I was 39 in my last pregnancy, the one with the boy who is now 6, and remember well the sense of dread that pops up now and again as the unknown day of labor approaches. It's not that it was a particularly difficult pregnancy; none of mine were all that bad, none particularly scary, all low-risk. It's that you just don't know how it's going to go. No one ever does! And I am the sort of person who really, really does not like being in the situation where I don't know how things are going to turn out.
(Yes, yes. We are all, always, in that situation, all the time. We do not know how anything will turn out, and our world can change in an instant. But the great majority of the time it is possible to pretend otherwise. Pregnancy, not so much.)
That last pregnancy had a particularly harsh final week, during which I struggled almost minute by minute with many immediate fears. In the end it did all turn out fine. I had a quick and peaceful birth of a healthy and strong baby, and suffered no adverse complications to myself either.
For a long, long time afterward, though, I would startle myself---a rush of warm relief would come out of nowhere. It's over---I got through it---no bad thing that I feared happened---it all turned out okay---the waiting and worrying, about THAT anyway, is over.
Kelly commented on one of my posts after the 9yo was born, "That moment when the afterbirth is out and I hobble to the bed and lay down. That feeling of being not pregnant. As not pregnant as you can ever get. It's the greatest feeling in the world." It's almost exactly that same feeling, the one that would come to me for months afterward, in a rush of surprise: The hard thing is over, and it turned out okay (and I don't have to go through it again).
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Where am I going with this? Some time ago I stumbled across a crumpled sheet of notebook paper, something that the 19yo had clearly discarded while he was home: an errant draft of a homework assignment for one of his college classes. It was a sheet of mathematical calculations; I was in a hurry at the moment, so I didn't pause to examine it to decide if it was a sheet from a calculus class, or statistics, or financial mathematics. I dropped it in the recycling bin and went on.
Something about seeing the rows and rows of double and triple integrals in my 19yo's familiar handwriting tickled the back of my mind, though, and gave me little bursts of that same sort of relief all day.
Even if everything is going very well, there's a lot of how is this going to turn out rumbling around under the surface of raising children, all the time! And of course, since we went ahead and decided to manage all their schooling ourselves, there's some extra how is this going to turn out related to that as well.
Look, we're all going to screw up along the way. I did. I stumbled through a lot of this. Mark will be the first to tell you that he stumbled too. We didn't know how it would turn out. And of course it's not done "turning out" --- there are many more steps along the road, even for this young man, who's doing his own thing now and is mainly responsible for himself, and is getting to take math classes that I didn't get to take.
It's still not done turning out. I can't see inside the 19yo's head, nor would I want to. I know that when I was that age I still had many things going on unformed inside my heart and mind, many things that needed to be dealt with, troubles that would surface later, so much left to learn.
But... some of the hard thing, the part that was my job, is over for me. I have handed it on to someone competent to take over from me. And it turned out... better than okay: whole, and complicated, and deeper than I can see and know even if I were to read every book on the shelf.
I expected it would probably turn out okay, but knowing that it did is enormously better than that.
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