My son was a happy little boy, once. Never certain what being a child meant, his vocabulary by age two was extensive, matched only by his curiosity. Secure with the place he held in his little world, he knew he was the center of my universe.
Circumstances intervened. At the age of seven, he was abruptly taken from me by a mentally unstable and at best, domineering father. For the next two and a half years, neither of us knew whether the other was even alive. When I found him, we had to start from scratch, as he had effectively “forgotten” me. He had never been out of my thoughts, but he returned to me a different child. Then ten years old, he was somber and fearful, and security seemed something which would take a miracle to find again.
The fear, the lack of trust, the sense of abandonment after his father essentially dropped out of his life not long after being returned to me, all contributed to a very low self-esteem. My once-happy child was lost forever, inside a boy, then teenager, then young man who seemed disconnected from people in general.
A few years back, I was deeply moved by his assertion that I was the only person he truly trusted. Though glad to have his trust, it was heartbreaking that he did not feel that for anyone else. He also confessed to a sense that he was destined to live a short life, and that he didn’t know “how” to be happy. “Maybe,” he told me, “Normal, for me is just this, and I wasn’t meant to be happy.”
As a mother, I can tell you that his words nearly crushed the life out of me. My son was perceptive and intuitive and so very bright, but he couldn’t see this in himself, and I could not make him see it, no matter how I tried.
In September of 2003, he had a run of “bad luck.” One week, it was a car accident. The next, it was being held up in the parking lot of a Wal-Mart, where he had stopped to eat a hamburger in his truck on his way home after a long day. Two teenaged boys suddenly appeared beside him, shoved a gun in his face and ordered him to hand over his wallet.
He refused. When he told me this later, followed by telling me how he had “lost it” and run one of them down with a lead pipe while the other escaped in a nearby car, I asked him why he didn’t just give them his wallet.
“It wasn’t theirs.” He told me.
“How much was in it?” I asked, not that it made a difference. He told me he had twelve dollars.
Twelve dollars was, to him, worth risking his life. I begged him not to ever make that sort of choice again, and he told me he couldn’t promise that. He was twenty-four years old.
On September 16, the area in which we lived, in Virginia, was under a hurricane warning as Isabel threatened. I had lived there for twenty years, and never really seen a hurricane; they always skipped right past us without stopping. Still, actual warnings were rare and it was a somewhat unusual storm track. My son told me he was going to come and stay with me to ride out the storm, so I didn’t have to be alone. On Tuesday before the storm was to hit, I was stuck in traffic for hours, with people trying to evacuate. I was simply trying to get home. When I finally arrived home, I called him and told him not to worry about coming over; that I didn’t want him to have to deal with that sort of traffic. “I don’t want you to be alone, Mom.” Was his reply, and the next day, he loaded up his Explorer with emergency supplies I’d been unable to get before they sold out, and he made his way over.
Early on Thursday morning, the storm began closing in. I was very grateful to have him there, as my apartment lost both phone service and electricity. We rode out what turned out to be a far worse storm than we’d expected, together in the safety of my apartment, watching trees topple and snap from the wind.
His cell phone service was restored the following day, and a phone call to his stepfather, with whom he had been living, brought news that his room over the garage had been demolished by a massive tree which had fallen on that end of the house.
I knew that there was a good chance I would have lost him again, had he not been stubborn enough to venture over to my home, out of a protective instinct.
It was a week or so after that, we were talking again about his hard luck. It seemed, he told me, that if there was a God, then God was “out to get” him. His life had become a series of misfortunes. “Seems like life is trying to tell me something, and whatever it is, it isn’t good.” He told me.
“Or maybe,” I replied, “It’s trying to give you a wake-up call. Telling you that it’s keeping you here for a bigger purpose.”
There was no reasoning with him, though, and he continued in his cynicism. Four years later, the hard luck had continued, and in June of 2008, he lost his job. Two months later, he became homeless. For the next ten months, he slept in his car or in a series of seedy hotel rooms, living on Food Stamps and searching endlessly for work. Things just kept getting worse. In May of 2009, he was arrested for driving with a suspended license, and spent two nights in jail before I was able to bond him out.
Not long after that, my sister offered him a home. She’d had a roommate who moved out, so she had an extra room in her house… in Montana. All he had to do was to take her up on the offer. He hates cold, as much as I do. Still, reason won out and he boarded a plane and flew to Montana to try to find work; to start over.
By January, he’d become so desperate that he decided to look into going to the University, something I’d been wishing for years that he would do. In May, he finished his first semester at college with a 4.0 GPA. He’d initially thought he would go to learn computer repair skills. Halfway through the semester, he’d decided that he should continue on and get a Journalism degree.
This summer, he took time off to go meet and visit a long-time internet friend in Oregon. They had been close for some time, but neither had hoped for more. He has always been intimidated by children; she has two. It didn’t seem like a match made in heaven, but by the end of the week he was to have stayed, they had arranged for him to stay on with her. A month later, he returned home and went back to school.
He called me today, and I am prompted again to express my gratitude to whatever has changed my son into the man he is today. At the age of thirty-one, he has been transformed into someone capable of tremendous enthusiasm and appreciation for what life has to offer. He is in a serious relationship for the first time in his life, and just confessed to me that he “absolutely loves” his friend’s children; especially the three year-old daughter.
Perhaps that little girl is reaching the little boy he used to be; the one secure in his world and embracing his life. Whatever the cause, I don’t think I ever realized until now, how much I missed that boy. I didn’t even dare fully remember him, because my heart broke at the thought of what had become of him.
My heart is not breaking at the thought, any more. My son and I are both welcoming that lighthearted little boy back into our lives.
