This is my neighbor, Souren, who accidentally became a part of our family nearly three years ago. We met when I was sitting on the little strip of lawn that seeps out from under the chain link fence surrounding their house. The big yellow school bus stopped there each day at 3, and we would chat over the fence while I waited for my children to get home from school. I think it took me three days to learn how to pronounce his name – forever marking me as a lazy tongued American, compared to his tri-lingual boy genius. After a week I stopped bringing my waiting-for-the-bus book, since I knew he would come out, sandwich in hand, for our afternoon chat. By the time I met his mother Helene, he and I were already fast friends. When Helene left the country on a six week business trip a month later, Souren started his life in our home.

Souren is entrenched in our world now, coming with us to extend family barbeques, writing me mother’s day cards, and having a room of his own in our home as well as in his mother’s duplex four houses up. Lately, I’ve been trying to write about our strange relationship – this family of two and my family of four, now an odd assorted family of six. I want to write about parenthood and ownership; gratitude and jealousy; satisfaction and yearning; pride and disappointment; joy and heartache. But it’s hard, to be honest in a relationship this complex – when my nurturing instincts sometimes conflict with his mom’s; when my kids don’t share his mother the way he shares theirs; when I am so grateful to have this young blood in our lives, and simultaneously terrified that he will soon disappear into adulthood.

Can you ever write with complete honesty about your children – those of your genetic descant and those you chose of your heart? Once they’ve learned their alphabet and how to use a mouse, how can you lay bare the stories you carry about them and for them and of them? Where do you put the wonder and the terror, the laughter and the follies? How can you capture the complexity and wonder without, basically, EMBARRASSING THEM TO DEATH?

Alas, I have no answer.

This summer Souren has gone to lay his foot once again on German soil, his birthplace and homeland until he was nearly a teen. After being virtually attached by an IV to our wireless for the past two years, he has suddenly forgotten how to log onto a computer and has to be cajoled into writing even the briefest of five-line emails with nary a compound thought enclosed. Still, reading carefully between the lines, and remembering what it was once to be young, what little I’ve heard of his time there indicates it has been rife with rites of passage – what with being legally of age in Europe for booze and clubs, and with a girl at his side – not to mention the father he hadn’t seen since before puberty and the attic full of childhood memories waiting for him to sort out.

It’s just….I remember the summer of my 17 year – all the heat and pheromones, all the freedom and romance– and I know that what comes speeding after it is so much more growing up, so much differentiating from home and hearth and parenting. Those ties between him and me, between him and us, are already much thinner than a lifetime of family-ness could have brought. What will happen to them as they are stretched by the final years of high school, by this incredibly heady summer?

Who can say and who can tell and who can know? It is utterly unknown territory and I, in some part of my soul, am both terrified and—truthfully—a little in awe. We do this, we humans? This growing up thing? What a wonder.

“Wait!” my heart moans, “I didn’t get enough time. You can’t be moving through these rites yet! You only just came to me! I didn’t get the early years!” Yet at the same time I know that this one’s long history of growing up is not within my rights to hold. What I get access to is this little part- time window between the first day of high school and the last–that’s all. I want to guard that time, press out the minutes like the edges of a toothpaste tube, make sure I don’t miss any thing I’m entitled to.

But the reality is I’m entitled to nothing. Every bit of this childhood is a bonus gift. And with this thought I realize in spite of my disquietness, there’s really no other option, is there? I wouldn’t want to miss this stretching, tearing thing – watching the wolfpup in growup, thrashing out his way in a world that will, all to soon, be his for the taking.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 11th, 2007 at 5:45 pm and is filed under Magpie Mama.
Tags: Magpie Mama, souren



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