Thanks

If nothing else (and I know there are millions of other something else’s) we have guided Turner into the wondrous world of manners. He rarely forgets to say thank you or please. Though he calls everyone “sir”, the most important words in the English language have to be thank you.

My mother keeps sending Turner clothes because he has grown out of many things so quickly. A pair of shorts will arrive one day. A $5.00 bill set aside for a special Turner treat found its way into our mailbox another day. A box of books was the main attraction last week. Mothers are ever-aware of children’s needs, and I have spent much of my life denying this fact, pushing the ‘hand outs’ off. I am thankful my mother is harder-headed than I and that she continues to meet my needs by providing for Turner in a way that I can’t afford to do right now. It is humbling and healing all at the same time. Each time something new arrives for Turner he opens it with joy, and I cry with thanksgiving. Turner touches my face, wipes away my tear, “You are crying Mommy?” “Yes I’m crying because I’m happy.” “Oh, I cry too.” He wipes his tears away, and thinks for a moment, “We tell Nanny thank you!”

Today he goes down for his nap. He yells from his bed, which is lined with three airplanes, a Mater tow truck, Sally (his red Porsche), Thomas train, Bear (from La La), Bunny (from Janet), and teddy (from Grandmother). Comforted by his well-organized sleeping audience, Turner needs only one thing I forgot…the hall light on. Of course it is the middle of the day, but none of us feel safe enough to sleep here without lights on. He yells to me, “Please turn light on Mommy.” And again, “Mommy [more impatient emphasis on the ‘e’ sound] please turn hall light on please, please.” I get to the light but there is a delay from the time you light it until it turns on. “light Mommy pl…” the light pops on. A very angelic and calm, “Thanks Mommy.” It sounds more like thinks with that long snakey ‘s’.

Where'd you get those words?

I can't say (write) it enough, but Turner's vocabulary is that of my students most days. I mean that as a compliment to my son, who seriously is more well-spoken than my first-year, Southern California, half-naked 18 year olds! Anyway, he really has a lot to say.

We are leaving school yesterday and we come into the lobby to see Jo, the preschool's director. She says, "Well hello Turner" in her super, sweet way. Turner, without missing a beat, drops my hand, walks to her desk and says, "Well hello Jo." This is their conversation.

She smiles. "Turner, I just love all your words."
"Uh huh"
"Where'd you get all those great words."
"Yeah"
I interject..."Did you get them in library?"
He exclaims with that grin he has when he knows the answer to your question. "Books! I get 'em from books."
"Wow." Ms. Jo replies.
"Turner, can you tell Jo where we are going?"
"My special treat."
"You're getting a special treat today?"
"Ice Cream!" (Thanks to Chiara who sent me a Coldstone Creamery gift card to fuel my addiction since $4.00 ice cream is no longer in our budget; I'm always happy to share an ice cream experience with my favorite boy)
Again, I intercede "Good rewards for good boys."
"Well" Jo directs her attention back to Turner, "you must get a special treat everyday."
"Yep." Turner grabs my hand to pull me to the door.
I offer a quick "Yep. But it isn't always ice cream."

We retire to the ice cream store where he tells me all about his day. Everyday I pick him up we have an hour or so to ourselves just so I can hear all about his day. This is the way I keep my sanity and put at bay the guilt I feel for sending him off to preschool for too many hours out of the day. It is my favorite hour of the entire day. Yesterday we elongated our time by turning to sidewalk chalk and pictures of dolphins and butterflies (the animals of the week...again). He is still loving fish, but only if they are "really, REALLY big."

"I praying to Jeezus"

If nothing else, our move to Tucson has enhanced my need to pray and look to the Lord more for strength, guidance, and patience. I have always been a heavy pray-er, but I have not always pushed prayer before meals. Turner has never gone to bed (in my presence) without his "Now I lay me down to sleep" and my special blessing over his sleepy head. In Tucson, however, I have needed my faith more than ever. Actually, I've always needed it, it is just that now I am actually appreciating the total lack of control I have over my life. So, at every meal time we are praying. Andy offered up the prayer he remembered from childhood: Come dear Jesus, be our guest, and something the food which thou has blessed. Turner recites this (obviously much more adeptly than I) but he always laughs before he pushes out the first line. I don't know why it is so funny, but I think he likes the way "Jesus" fits into his mouth. We do the standard prayer and then I or Andy top it off with our individual prayer much like the set up for night time prayers. Normally, Turner gets though the reciting part and starts scooping food into his mouth about half-way through my part. I've mentioned it before, but when Turner is finished praying he normally makes it known that the prayer is over for everyone.

Night before last we are putting Turner to bed and as we begin his standard prayer he stops us and says "I want to pray to Jesus". The way the word comes out of his mouth, though, sounds like a Texan - Jeeezzzusss. The z is super strong and the s is so soft and snake-like. So we altered our prayer to be to Jesus instead of Dear God. I must rush off to orientation stuff. I am really wanting to pray to Jesus right now that we get the Internet at home so I can keep my family in touch with Turner's life.

One last thing...Turner is LOVING school and, surprise surprise, they are LOVING him. He is using his manners more than the other children and both of his teachers go on and on about what a sweet boy he is (and smart too of course). They've had only three days with him. Think how much he can wow them in a month. Yesterday...ahh there is so much to relay and no time in which to do it...it thundered and I had promised to take him to the park if he was a good "rainbow fish" (a book abotu sharing). When I got there he said first thing "I was a good rainbow fish Mommy." His teachers looked puzzled. "It is thundering, but no rain Mommy. Ducks are scared of the rain." I explain to his teachers that we are going to the park if he is a good share-er. We go and feed the ducks in the rain with bread some other mom offered to us b/c this mom didn't have any bread that was stale enough to throw away...ahhh money really is a valuable resource and the last piece of bread for half a turkey sandwich is much more important than taking it to the ducks. Besides, there is always a mommy like the one I was in Lexington who brings extra bread for the "poor kids who have mommies too busy to remember". We all eat thoughtless words of judgement sooner or later don't we? sorry no time to proofread. forgive the errors

My Whiny Ramblings: Metamorphosis into Boyhood

We still don’t have the internet in our townhouse, and the prospect of it ever gracing our door is meager at best. Once school starts I’m sure I can steal a few moments on a computer more regularly to continue to share Turner’s latest and greatest with everyone. There have been so many things to happen in the past month – new accomplishments, funny axioms, conversations that surprise even his number one fan – and I hate that I don’t have them recorded in some fashion. Though I won’t say they are all lost forever, many of them won’t make it into a form of print to share with our family. Sorry for cheating you out of those because we have really watched Turner blossom in this last month. In the face of extreme stress, necessary patience, elongated bouts of boredom, and lots of being ignored or shooed away while Andy and I tried to get work done, Turner has stepped into his big boy body and now that we’ve slowed down enough to enjoy life with him again, he no longer seems to need us. We’ve all been forced to grow because of this journey, which is a good thing, and hopefully we will continue to grow together; but it is hard to shake the realization that all growth means we must leave something behind too and what Turner left behind was the little moments of baby that I clung to desperately only a month ago. Now, there is no baby left in Turner. He is struggling to hang onto moments of being a toddler and hitting high speed toward pre-K. Most likely, he has been forced to grow faster than I intended for him to. Do all mothers feel this way?

Perhaps I am overreacting. Maybe all of this utter loneliness is not because Turner has miraculously morphed into a big boy, but because he started preschool. He has a life outside of mine. He has friends whom I can’t remember their names. He has a teacher that is doing all the things with him that I wish I were doing with him. I drop him off in the morning and he is giddy to go alone into the world of preschool. He no longer wants to hold my hand, but relents when I require hand-holding in the parking lot. In fact, he looks defeated when we step out of the car into a parking lot. “Parking lot Mommy” he says with sad intonation, and he reaches for my hand. I remember not long ago when he wanted to hold my hand all the time, and I would tell him how special it made me feel when he held my hand; he’d look up into my face and with all seriousness say, “You are special Mommy, like me.” Now, however, he holds my hand through the parking lot and drops it immediately when we hit the sidewalk. No step is too big. No jump is too high. Nobody is scary anymore.

When I return in the afternoon to pick him up (I show up as soon as I can after his nap is finished so we can have time before dinner to play), he doesn’t run to greet me at the door. Instead, he looks in my direction, says “Mommy” and goes back to his work of playing. I always walk to him, sit down, and have him show me what he is doing and tell me about his day. He tries to include me, but loses patience when I don’t understand. I don’t know the children’s names; I’m trying to learn them. He tells me about lunch and I cringe knowing that my son is eating meatballs that probably are loaded with sodium and trans fat. I’m proud though he is eating well at school and is always one of the cleanest kids after lunch. Perhaps they strip them down to their underwear to eat because Turner never eats that clean at home. My mind is racked with all the ‘what ifs’ of preschool. I know no one will care for my son, love him, talk to him, or teach him in the ways that I do. That is what makes me the mommy. Yet, I’m not there to know everything of his day either. I trust these people with my child. His teachers and the director have really listened to me (which means a lot; I’m sure parents are constantly telling Laura too much information about their children, and I can understand how annoying this can be but I can’t help myself.) They all know him, not just his name but how to talk to him and when to praise him and when to redirect him and when he needs to be spoken to about his behavior. So while I trust them, I can’t shake the feelings that things are happening that I don’t know about. They don’t have to be bad things, but apparently anything happening in Turner’s life is a missed opportunity for me to see his personality form.

I know it is important for him to find his own place in the world. He shares his day with such pride that I know this is good for him. Cheryl told me it would be harder for me. I know, I know, I know he needs this, but he is only two, right? I am not ready for him to be such a big boy. At night when he crawls into my lap to have our quick recap of the day where I praise him for the things he did as a good boy and remind him why he got in trouble for the not so good boy things, I am always tempted to hang tightly to his little hugs…to not let him go. Of course he won’t let me do that, not let go. He yells at me, “Stop Mommy!” He wipes off my kisses if I don’t forewarn him they are coming or if he just decides he doesn’t want kisses. Normally I can turn it into a game of my kisser is broken and he is the only one who can fix it. That gets me at least seven or eight kisses in row with that beautiful giggle in the middle until I finally smooch back and he exclaims, “I fixed it Mommy. Hooray!” I just don’t get it. If everyone’s kids are this perfect why haven’t the world’s problems been traded in for kissing, hugging, and thanksgiving? Watching my son makes me want to do those things all the time.

The Mountain Adventure

We were somewhere in Texas and the mountains set off in the distance as a reminder that we aren’t at home anymore. There were several precursors to this realization: breaking down in Nashville, breaking down in Memphis, showering and sleeping where others had been less than 24 hours prior, eating out of the car, fatigued legs from inactivity, lots of tears and heart wrenching moments of Turner asking to go home or needing to hear one more time that Chi wouldn’t be at our new house. So while there were signs that we no longer even had a home, when those mountains appeared in the distance after days of Texas nothingness, I cried. Those mountains symbolized the passage into a new life. A life of school, being too busy to be the kind of mom and wife I want to be, a life where Turner would go to preschool and fall more in love with his teacher than with me. Tears slipped down my cheek. I didn’t want Andy to know I was crying…again. Those mountains were majestic in their far off beauty with nothing leading up to them to shadow their height or rugged landscape. The cacti dotted the rocky soil. The clouds clustered around the top, showering it with relief from the hot sun. I wrote this in the car when we first saw the Texas landscape change:

The mountains look cartoon-ish. The sun is blazing on the desert and the spiky vegetation only to be blocked in twenty feet circles by fluffy, white clouds. A shadow is cast lending one’s imagination to believe what s/he sees is drawn by hand rather than created by divine wisdom. Each segment of the dry Earth is alleviated from the direct sun momentarily by the passing of low marshmallows in the sky. It is stark, but refreshing to appreciate landscape finally. Thus far our trip has been marked by tribulations and our fatigue from these trials. Today our countryside has changed from small town nothing of Texas to the desert of what is to soon encircle our new life.

So I was writing about the landscape, tears fell because I was, again, feeling sorry for our family all alone in the great unknown, and then Turner took a quick sabbatical from his Cars movie (at this point in its second viewing of the day) to exclaim, “Look Mommy. Mountain. Yeah! Mountain.” Why was he excited about the mountain? I’m not sure. Of course, I’m not sure why I was so heartbroken by something so beautiful either.

“Yeah Buddy. It is a mountain.” I wiped the tears and faced him in the back seat. He was smiling and in an instance I was reminded why we were making this journey. “Do you like the mountains?” “Biiiiigggg mountain, Mommy.”
“Yep.”
“Look Mommy.” An arm that grew at least a foot last night points out the other car window. “Another mountain.” I look and shake my head. “A bigger mountain.”
“Yep. That is a bigger mountain buddy.”

Fast forward a week. We are driving around Tucson doing our best to cram all the errands we can into a day, as we’ve done for four straight days. Turner is cordial in his car seat for the ninth day straight. I’ve broken down and given him pop tarts, which I think he loves more than suckers. The mountains shelter Tucson from seeing very far into the desert. They surround the urban sprawl on three sides, and Turner points at the mountain at every turn and exclaims, as though it is the first time, “Look Mommy, mountain. Yeah mountain!” I’m remembering this fondly now, but after so many days of struggle and errands that turned into hours of waiting in line, in nasty chairs, in people’s offices, in the hot sun, I was not as fond of Turner’s exclamations at that point. He was, and is, so excited by the mountains. Now, as I reflect, I understand (or think I do) that God was gently pushing us to enjoy perhaps the best aspect of Tucson. We were spending our time worrying about every bad thing Tucson was and symbolized to us. I was lost in my want for something friendly and familiar. Turner was intrigued by the difference and beauty.

After Turner awoke from his nap today, he and I went on an adventure. He has been asking to go up the mountains since we first arrived. We haven’t had the time or we haven’t had a vehicle to go, but tonight we had both. So, Turner and I packed a dinner that we ate in the car (cold pizza, banana, pop tarts [yes, he’s still getting to eat pop tarts], and pretzels). Not exactly the most balanced dinner, but it was portable. We drove up into the mountain and with every hill Turner and I sang our “Going up, up, up” song. Every dip and downward sprint we threw our hands into the air and yelled “wheee” as though we were on a roller coaster. We did this in Lexington too and had abandoned it during our journey here. I figured it was time to remind Turner that trips can be fun again. We make it a little into the mountain (I have no idea what its name is) and we pull into a parking lot to go hiking. I ask if he wants to go hiking. I don’t know if he knows what that means but he jumps from his seat and asks, “Like you and Chi?” Now, Chiara and I went hiking once, and Turner did not go with us. How does he remember this stuff? (A question I ask a lot).

I give him his responsibility (he has one everywhere we go). Since I don’t have pockets, I put the car key in his pants pocket and tell him it is his responsibility to keep it safe (the pocket velcroed shut). We walk to the water and watch it rush down the mountain while we stand safely on the bridge. I tell him it sounds like being at Grandma’s house. I start to get lost in this memory until he pauses from his vision and says “Grandmother?” I tell him no, that Grandma Bow has the creek at her house. A moment later I remember that Grandmother has taken Turner to the creek at her house too, so I correct myself. We tire of watching the water and we begin our hike up into the mountain.

Ventana Canyon has probably thirty miles of trails. Most begin from Loewes Resort with a 2.1 mile trail that serves as the feeder trail into the many, many others. Turner and I climb over huge boulders, squeeze through tiny spaces, splash in the water, race through the sandy passages, and watch the fire ants prepare for winter. He rides piggyback for about a ¼ of a mile up the mountain over some big boulders that were challenging for me to climb over with my long legs. Turner was content to ride once he failed in his attempt to climb over the first boulder that was chest high on him. We stopped and appreciated the sun setting in the distance. We admired the tall cacti that probably had been placed there by God himself (apparently cacti are one of the slowest growing plants in the world; it is illegal to do anything to any type of cacti in the state of Arizona because they are so slow growing). One cactus was at least thirty feet tall. A large hiking group ahead of us stopped and took several minutes’ worth of pictures of it, so Turner and I stopped and admired it for a long time as well since it seemed a novelty. We saw a bunny rabbit cross our path, but we couldn’t chase it into the prickly brush. A large Cardinal bird flew over and all at once I felt a piece of home. I was carrying my favorite little boy on my back, his hands clinging tightly to my shoulders, his breath in my right ear, his trust obviously in me, out in nature, soaking up the fresh air, enjoying the 70 degree temperature at 6:30 pm, watching the Kentucky bird grace us with a moment of familiarity. I put Turner on the ground and stoop to hug him. I thank him for coming hiking with me, for being such a great companion. He smiles and from no where in particular he says, “I love you Mommy.” And just as quickly, he is gone, rushing up the trail to achieve the mountain. “I’m hiking Mommy. Hiking the mountain. Com’ on Mommy.”

I follow him for twenty more minutes as we wind our way through the rugged landscape, never really getting close to going up the mountain but changing our elevation, according to the guide way in front of us, by 1,000 feet from Tucson’s center. When we decided to retreat home, Turner stops suddenly while a bird tweets in the bushes. “The birdies are talking to me.” Turner says this often when birds are making noise around him. I always inquire about the conversation, but he never has a response. We sat down on a large rock (I’m ever alert for snakes because the snakes here aren’t the snakes at home) and I ask Turner what the birdies say. He thinks. He listens. The bird speaks again. He thinks. He turns to me. “They say tweet, tweet Mommy.” Oh, well now that is cleared up. “You keep talking to the birds. It is much nicer to talk to them than to yell at them.” “Otay Mommy.” He had been yelling at flies and gnats throughout our hike as they pestered us. I tried to explain that flies didn’t speak English. I told him later they didn’t have ears. He corrected me and said everything has ears. I guess this is true; in some way or another all animals can use their senses in the way we use our ears. Finally, I just shoo the gnats away too and we run together to dodge them. Like everything, it becomes a game that he will always win. How precious is his life! I hope I can adequately share his moments with words so our families and friends don’t feel as cheated by our absence. We can’t apologize enough to you all for leaving. Yet, we can’t dream high enough for the possibilities for Turner. He will only know how to search for dreams by watching his parents struggle for theirs.