I'm not finished

Written two years ago, 2014. I write this stuff but don't know where to put it. Just found it again. For the record I'm in a different and better place now, fortunately. Thanks y'all!

I'm not finished

by Terri Mork Speirs

Recently we moved our son’s bedroom to the basement, two floors down.

For all of his previous 15 years, he had been sleeping in a room immediately next to us, my husband Bob and me. Five homes and four cities, but always in a room next to us. Now the boy is two flights of stairs away, in a room with a futon, a TV, an egress window, and a single bed that barely fits his brawny six-foot frame. (Really? Did I just use the word “brawny” to describe my child?) The room has new dry wall and a shag area rug on a freshly painted cement floor, thanks to Bob who has been painstakingly rehabbing the basement after the flood seven years ago, when our son was in second grade. The completion of that room coincided with our son’s launch into a more independent stage of life, a full-fledged teenager. Fifteen.

The move signaled his transition from a baby-faced cherub to a six-foot creature. His boyhood slip sliding to manhood. Thus, my motherhood slip sliding to . . . where?

The first Saturday morning my son emerged from his basement cave, unapologetic bedhead and basketball shorts, I marveled at this lumbering man-child and that I was his mother. My kid could easily be mistaken for an adult, I realized. Ambling into the kitchen, his bare legs seemed an act of rebellion because it was November and the house was cold. We live in an old four-square farm house in an Iowa suburb. Winters are cold here, inside and out. For some reason the heat vents in the lower level work best, maybe because they are newer, and my son’s room is the most temperate in the house. His basketball shorts were not rebellion, but another indicator that my son has moved somewhere else. He’s in the warm part of the house, I’m in the cold part.

I thought of the boys I knew in my childhood – uncles, brothers, friends’ brothers – boys who lived in basements with painted cement for flooring, and how exotically male they seemed to me as a young girl. They were ready for something that I was not, I thought. They were ready to be grown up, or at least look the part. To accept a bedroom in the basement with a painted floor equated maturity to live in a nether world, the adult world. But now we have our very own painted-cement-floored bedroom, accommodating our very own man-child.

Finally, I see through the mysteries of male hood and teen boys. 

My son favors fruit loops for breakfast. And he likes chocolate milk. To him, his new room is a pseudo apartment that needs a mini-fridge. To me, it’s a bribe to leverage. He asserts liberation. I assert power.

“You join drama club, I’ll buy you a mini-fridge,” I offer. So far, no deal. Mostly, he prefers to skateboard with his friends and hibernate in his new subterranean space. He keeps it simple, no drama, though he does participate in the church bell choir. Not sure if that’s for the sake of joy or to please his parents.

My son’s move downstairs was part of a greater shift in our family. In a matter of weeks, we transitioned from a family of four to a family of one (two equals one when schedules are off). Our singular nuclear family, perfectly symmetrical in gender and number, has divided into distant parts.

My son (subject of this story, teenager ground zero).

My daughter (off to frosh year of college).

My husband (doing his thing).

Me (undecided).

Before this atomic split occurred, the upper bathroom/bedroom cluster of our old farmhouse teamed with toothbrushes and schedules competing for the sole shower. Now, one child is four states away, the other is two staircases away.

It’s quiet.

Suddenly, Bob and I are stuck in a small wedge between parenthood and freedom, finding it difficult to enjoy either. When we lean into parenthood, our only son spends the night at a friend’s house or disappears downstairs. When we consider renewing our dating life, we think of our son home alone and can’t enjoy a night out. 

As for me, I am stuck in the middle of motherhood and a sort of quasi post-motherhood, post-modern motherhood, post-haste motherhood, post-mortem motherhood. Where am I? I can’t think of a name to call it. What do you call it when you’ve felt like a harried working-mother for 18 years and all of a sudden, you are no longer harried? It went from harried to this (whatever I end up calling “this”), with no in between time. Harried motherhood shown brightly but burned out fast, like a sparkler on the Fourth of July. Burned erratically, then darkened.

Where do clever children’s toys go after purchase? They’re crammed everywhere possible -- under beds, in dresser drawers, on top of book shelves, behind closet doors. Pokémon cards, baseball hats, stuffed animals, erector sets, legos, matchbox cars, mountains of clothes that no longer fit. The move downstairs involved sorting all my son’s things into two categories: what he wanted and what he didn’t. Big-boy things made the cut to new teen room, and little-boy things stacked in random piles of junk. Besides bonking myself on the side of my head for buying all that stuff throughout the years, I got a bit sentimental.

“You had a good boyhood, right?” I asked, realizing it was presumptuous of me. What a stupid question to ask a polite son.

“Yes, it was good.” That’s all he said.

My son’s childhood is over. This stage of motherhood is done.

But I’m not finished.