At the Grand Canyon, with Teenage Boys

Notes on Love & Laundry.

A few months ago, we took a family trip to the Grand Canyon. It was wonderful, and awful, for the following reasons.

If you've never been, the Grand Canyon is a gigantic, awe-inspiring 3-mile-deep gash in the earth. It's also the world's scariest tourist attraction if you're afraid of heights, which I am.

Because the Grand Canyon is 277 miles long, it's impossible for the National Park Service to fence the entire thing. So there are lots of places all along the Grand Canyon viewing area where you could accidentally plunge to your death.

Really.

If you got too close to the edge and slipped, you would die.

If you were taking a selfie and not paying attention to where you were standing, you would die.

If you owed money to the Russian mafia and they wanted to kill you and make it look like an accident, they could simply pretend to bump into you, knock you over the edge, and you would die.

Now, none of these things happened, obviously, since I lived to write this newsletter post.

But it could have happened. And this is where the teenage boys come in.

I am a middle-aged woman by virtue of the fact that I managed to live until middle age.

Those of us who reach middle age do so through a combination of luck and by saying no thank you, quite firmly, whenever anyone invites us to go hang gliding, bridge jumping, rock climbing, or sky diving. I avoid poisonous snakes, small twin engine planes, and war zones. In other words, I have common sense.

Teenage boys do not.

Instead they have something else. I'm not even sure there's a word for it. Anti-common sense? Testosterone? An intrinsic desire to break things, including themselves?

While at the Grand Canyon, haranguing my teenage sons to stay away from the edge, I noticed a woman with a baby strapped to her chest, and a strange feeling stirred my heart.

Jealousy.

Normally I don't envy people with babies. If parenthood were an Olympic sport, babies would not be curling or cross-country skiing. Babies would be ski jumping, that sport where athletes like Eddie the Eagle fly off a monstrous ski jump into thin air and then try to land on their skis, but instead go crashing into the Rolex sign at the finish line and become part of that terrible montage they used to play at the beginning of the ABC News Wide World of Sports.

Babies are hard. But you know what else is hard?

Having teenage boys who are big enough and old enough to wander right up to the edge of the Grand Canyon. And you can't do anything to stop them.

Or protect them.

You can't wrap them up and strap them to your chest in a Bjorn because now they weigh more than you do, and they're taller. You can't put them in a crib or buckle them into a car seat while you drive slowly, carefully home from the hospital. You can't even hold their hand when they cross the street because they would find this deeply mortifying.

All you can do is say things like, "For the love of all that is Holy, please don't stand so close to the edge." And they'll give you an exasperated, but tolerant smile, and say, "Mom. It's fine. Don't worry."

As I stood there at the Grand Canyon thinking these thoughts and staring at the woman with the baby strapped to her chest, it occurred to me that this is all a metaphor for That Big Thing that was about to happen in the fall.

My oldest child leaving for college.

As I stood starring down at the abyss beneath my feet, I realized that my days of herding children away from danger will end in just a few more years when the last child leaves the nest.

All I can do is hope and pray that the good judgement, common sense and luck that carried me into middle age somehow transfers to them thru some sort of umbilical or environmental osmosis.

It's an odd feeling, knowing that this first phase of motherhood is coming to an end with my oldest child, and I wonder what the next phase will bring.

So far, it's going well. My oldest seems to enjoy being fully in charge of his own life.

And this knowledge has allowed me to peek around the corner at the stage beyond, a phase where my sons remind a little old lady with white hair and osteoporosis to be careful, to go slowly, to watch her step.

It's the phase where I'm the little old lady. And they're the adults.

I'm reasonably confident that when we get to that point, they'll watch over me with the same love and care I've shown them.

If they do, I'll be okay.

And I think they'll be okay too, even when I'm not there to warn them away from the edge.

Here we are at the Grand Canyon. 

I'm the person in the middle wearing a parka because I'm always cold.

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