Enjoying the Journey

by John Ettorre

We worried about our Patrick.

Like many parents of kids born close together, my wife and I occasionally revisit the wisdom of our family-planning decisions, having our only two children just 16 months apart. As a second child myself in an old-fashioned "bunched Catholic" family (where moms of that era tended to get all of their breeding duties out of the way in rapid succession), I knew there would be challenges as those kids went through puberty forever paired in implicit competition.

Still, kids tend to have an innate sense of what they need to thrive. While they can’t always express it, through some combination of dumb luck and parental Kremlinology, you can pick up on most of the cues you need. And as our youngest finished up the sixth grade a couple years ago, all indicators were pointing to a change of schools, where he could come out from beneath his big brother’s shadow.

He wanted to switch to a grade school just down the street, where he already knew a lot of the kids from summer baseball. We put him off as we worried about the right thing to do, but eventually we OK’d the switch. And just weeks into the experiment, we knew we had dodged a bullet. Our son was obviously thriving.

But nothing would be certain, I figured, until after the school play this spring. This production is a big deal, the centerpiece of the school year, and doubly so for graduating eighth-graders for whom it serves as the emotional conclusion of their time. Somehow, the sainted women who produce this play have accomplished the miraculous; they’ve made it cool for adolescent kids to act in a play, as cool as being a star athlete. Shortly after the first of the year, practices begin, and for four months these kids are focused on one thing – creating the kind of crisply choreographed spectacle that leaves the audience thinking they’ve somehow accidentally stumbled into a Broadway production, only with shorter actors.

This year the play was Grease. And in February, the news came that our boy had snagged a leading role. He’d have lots of speaking lines, and even sing a romantic solo!

Opening night was largely a blur, amid a sea of eager faces in the audience, including a healthy assortment of extended family members. But I mostly blocked it all out. For two and a half hours, I sat as if bolted to my chair watching in awe as my Patrick confidently negotiated the stage like a seasoned thespian. He made us laugh and cry and applaud till our hands hurt.

In some ways, his victory on the stage wasn’t even the best part of the week. One morning after an evening production, as the extended family left church, headed for breakfast at a restaurant, where Patrick would no doubt be the center of attention, he crossed us up by quietly insisting that he be dropped off at home in order to complete some homework. We later learned that he was indeed doing some work at home, but it wasn’t what we thought. Instead, he was writing a heartfelt poem to share with the rest of the cast, his new schoolmates and prospective lifelong friends.

It was filled with the kind of love and warmth and deep feeling for others that a parent could only hope their offspring might some day muster as an adult. At 14, he had found a way to plumb his deepest feelings about friendship and shared effort before translating them into words he could share, something plenty of people never accomplish over an entire lifetime.

In short, our Patrick was coming of age, somehow taking the confusing raw material of adolescence and baking it into the still-forming product of a smart, savvy and interesting kid. And one filled with love.

Parenting is the ultimate humbling profession. You begin so full of bone-deep ignorance imagining itself as a kind of oracular wisdom of the ages, and in just a few short years events conspire to show you how little you really know. You’re swept up by happenstance and events utterly outside your control, which the most imaginative novelist couldn’t begin to invent. God gives you brief stewardship of a life for but a moment, and if you’re smart, you learn to step back a little and let Him take that child where he or she is headed.

And so as our Patrick enjoys his last summer before entering high school, I’m basking in the boy he’s becoming. He’s not the boy I thought we raised, nor the one I thought we had living with us only a couple of years ago. He’s so much more than that, and the surprises have no doubt only just begun.

I think I’m going to enjoy the journey.

John Ettorre is a Cleveland-based writer and editor who has also worked in Washington, D.C. and Chicago. Over a 20-year career, his writing has appeared in more than 70 publications, including the New York Times. His online weblog, Working With Words, can be found at www.workingwithwords.blogspot.com. To reach John, send e-mail to: jettorre@voyager.net or leave a message at (440) 708-2994.