(Note to 7QT readers: I’m doing a Fiction Friday this week, so I’m trying something a little different with my 7QT this week. Hope you don’t mind. 🙂 )
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In so many ways, he’s so much like me.
1. He spends his days in a wild frenzy of imagination. In theory, he loves toys. In reality, he doesn’t play with them. He is his own toy, acting out his flights of fancy with unselfconscious enthusiasm…as long as nobody’s watching.
2. He loves with his whole heart, and with his whole heart he feels rejection…and frustration. He wants to hug and wrestle with his little brother and sister, and when they push him away, he crumples. When they drive him crazy, he feels that deeply, too. (Although he deals with it better than I did at his age. He screams. I used to hit.)
3. Because of these two traits, he is not a social butterfly. He is a child who attaches to one or two friends and devotes himself wholeheartedly to them. Like his mama, who never had more than two close friends at a time. (Still doesn’t.)
4. He’s interested in the world and the events on the news. He doesn’t talk about them much, which makes me wonder how much of the tragedy and angst goes right over his head. But he’s intensely curious about how things work and what’s happening in the world beyond his immediate experience. He says he wants to be (among other things) a scientist when he grows up.
5. He has an artist’s soul—loving beauty in creation, thrilled by art projects, and a natural at music. He loves piano lessons, and tore through his primer level at a rate that left his teacher slightly befuddled. (And his mama weepy with pride.)
6. He has my ear. Yesterday afternoon he was sitting at the table reading while I made dinner, humming a snatch of song over and over. And over. And over. At length, I identified it as the Atkins theme song. Last week, he brought home his first “goal sheet” from school: he was getting distracted and leaving work incomplete, forgetting to write his name on his paper. “But I have this song in my head ALL THE TIME!” he wailed. Christian told him to make a radio switch in his mind and turn it off. I rolled my eyes and shook my head. “Honey,” I said as gently as I could, “that is not going to work. Take my word for it. He’s just got to learn to live with it.” (My musician friends call it an “earworm.” I will host the same music running through my head nonstop for 36 hours. Even at night. I’ll wake up and it’ll be there. So this, I know: he really does just have to learn to live with it.)
7. And perhaps the ease with which he learns music and art and reading and all things creative is why he gets so frustrated when he has trouble learning other skills. (You need only watch the first 55 seconds to see both my son and I in action.)
In so many ways, my son is just like me. And it makes me realize that everything I experienced as a child—the good, the bad, and the ugly, the glorious and the heartbreaking—I will experience again, through the experiences of my firstborn child.
I don’t know if I’m ready for this.
Shared with
Kathleen M. Basi 
I don’t know that I’m ready to relive things through my child who is just like me, either. And I find myself hoping I can offer guidance to her so that she might not experience some of the things I did that, in hindsight, seem awful self-inflicted. But then…she’s just like me and she’s not going to listen to her mother, either. 🙂
Your son seems so sweet. I love the pictures and it’s so clear how much you love him when you write about him. Of course this is true of all your children when you write about them, too.
Virtually everything we experience is self-inflicted, I think…but although we want to spare our children, I think that the process of the pain of growth is an inevitable part of the growth experience. I also try to pass on my hard-won ‘wisdom,” but even in my own ears it falls flat. I know he’s just going to have to get through it.
I’m in a way struggling with the opposite; my daughter is so confident and able to ask & fight for what she wants which I find so amazing because I’ve always been very timid and a ‘people pleaser’. I so want her to keep that confidence and fight, but currently would love if she listen to me and occasionally do what I ask without a long discussion/ negotiation.
LOL! Imagine that! Ah, the joys of parenthood. If it’s not one thing, it’s another.
It scares me sometimes to see that much of me in my kids. It’s bad enough that I have trouble distinguishing between some of my baby pictures and those of two of my kids…I can’t believe they could grow up to be more like me!
Kathleen, he looks so much like you. What an adorable boy!
I am often struck by how much you and I have in common – the music and arty side, the magnetic attraction of all things beautiful. I was especially surprised about your having only one or two close friends at a time. That’s me all over.
I admire how you get so many things done in your life – it’s really a lot. Unfortunately, for me, those days are over. I don’t regret it too much because I have more God time. However, I’ve had to do some really hard things regarding detachment. This past week I gave to the choir director some books with canons and rounds in them which can be used at Mass, and I’m rounding up my organ books and will give them to the organist. It’s been hard to let go of the fact that I will never sing in a choir again, never lead a choir again, and never play the organ again. But when I think of these things, I also think of the blessings God is replacing them with. Yet, I suppose it’s natural to grieve over surrendering what had been a really important part of my life. Important to me, maybe, but God said to move on in no uncertain terms. Now how did I end up here with these comments?
I can’t imagine the day when I won’t be involved in music ministry. But I know it will come sooner or later. I have a feeling it will be wrenching. May we all deal with such loss with grace!