Happy Birthday, “Surge”!

Published in The Fauquier Times-Democrat, Weekend Edition on Fri. March 2, 2012

Our three boys’ birthdays fall in the space of one month.  They will soon be 7, 14, and 17.   The youngest was born on February 28^th in Ohio in 2005, just five months before we moved here.  He is finally forty pounds.  Here is one child who is happy to be in a booster seat because it’s a promotion from that car seat.  Happy Birthday, Nathaniel!

The two older boys were born in Northern California.  The middle son will be fourteen on March 31^st.  Happy Birthday, Niles!

My eldest son, who is the third child, has his birthday on March 4^th.  Happy Birthday, Sergio!  I can’t believe you’re 17. 

There were times that I thought he might not survive childhood.  Sometimes, frankly, I thought I wouldn’t survive him.  He was chronically sick, tortured by an eczema that prevented him from sleeping through the night, and besieged by so many food allergies that he could only eat what I made at home, from scratch.  Have you tasted my cooking?  As if he wasn’t tortured enough.

I know how fortunate we are – we have anesthesia and antibiotics and public sanitation.  We have relatively easy transportation and ridiculously easy communication.  We can expect our children to survive infancy.  We live in a vastly wealthy nation compared to most of the inhabitants of earth.  We have access to plentiful and safe food, and we usually have clean water.  (I hope this doesn’t raise any blood pressures in Bealeton.)  We live in a time and place where our dangers tend to be the hurried pace of life or the excess of things – food, pleasure, possessions, and leisure time. 

But there are always the challenges.  People who have not lived with a two-year-old human being sometimes don’t understand how unreasonable these cute little people can be.  The theory of getting them to do what you want, when you want, is very simple - until you try to put it into practice.  This varies with each child, adult, your combined moods, and temperaments.  Other factors may include the ambient air pressure, which side of the bed you happened to roll out of, and whether or not you are wearing “angry” colors.

When our two eldest daughters were two and four years old, my brother, who was doing his medical residency rotations, came to stay with us in Northern California.  He brought with him my very sweet sister-in-law, a perennially cheerful person, and their two sons, ages four and three at the time.  Our household expanded to eight people, with half of them being preschoolers.

Those five or six weeks were a joyous time.  It flew by.  After a few days together, however, I thought to myself that my sister-in-law didn’t quite understand child discipline.  Those boys were out of control, I thought.  Poor thing.

Then, I had a boy of my own.

Not just any boy, either.  He was Sergio.  Much of his infancy is a blur of projectile vomit and his screaming whenever I tried to set him down.  There was crying to, but I soon learned to control my emotions.  I used to load him into a backpack carrier just so I could vacuum the house.

(It would be years later when I finally acquiesced and let my husband talk me into having a cleaning service help us out.  There should be no question as to who is the smarter one.  What was I trying to prove, exactly?  That I could do it all, save money, and become neurotic whenever sticky hands approached a glass door I had just cleaned?)

My Sergio might have been a difficult baby, but he was also exceptionally (and redeemingly) cute.  I might be biased, but on a tour through Yosemite National Park once, a woman cooed over him and asked repeatedly if she could take him with her.  There is a fine line between flattering and frightening someone.  By the end of the ride, I was scared.

Sergio became a difficult little boy, perhaps because he saw and valued things differently.  His younger years were filled with what, to me, were weird obsessions.  I developed coping mechanisms.  I allowed him to ride in his car seat while holding an electric weed whacker just so we could get places.  I took him to church with a thirty-foot extension cord coiled into a big diaper bag.

By the time he was three, my parenting skills had not just deteriorated: They were gone.   Leaving the grocery store, a bagger who once escorted me could not understand why I insisted on pushing the cart.  Every time she tried to commandeer the cart, Sergio, buckled in the cart, had a shrieking fit.  She gave up and let me push.  She bounced along beside me and said, “You know, my younger brother was just like that.  They finally put him on lithium.”  She eyed my boy and leaned over and whispered, “Have you looked into lithium?”

Sergio is now taller than me (not difficult), weighs more than me (a little more difficult), and is a young man I am proud to claim.  The past seventeen years have been quite a ride!  Even without the lithium.

Happy Birthday, "Surge"!

How to get a full-grown woman out of a shell

published in The Fauquier Times-Democrat Weekend on May 6, 2011


How is it possible that my daughter is turning 21? Is it really over two decades that I had my first encounter with the baby girl who is now a young woman? This person, who is half of me and half of my husband, but wholly her own person, introduced me to the perplexities of motherhood.


How the child survived the early years, I do not know. It probably has more to do with the grace of God and the supervision of my husband than my own skills. The very fact that I somehow botched the Biblical spelling of the child’s name when filling out the birth certificate in the hospital not be the sole indicator of my incompetence. (The ensuing years would pile further evidence in like the $5 video bin at Wal-Mart.)


In Philippians 4:2, there is a caution to two women to stop arguing: they are Syntyche and Euodia. Knowing that the former meant “fortunate” (but apparently not knowing how to spell it), I filled in “Synteche” on the birth certificate. I have since consoled myself that the pronunciation “SinTEEkee” is much prettier than “SinTYEkee.” So my variation (code word: misspelling) actually worked out better. That consolation is usually gone when we are in a waiting room and the receptionist scrunches up her face and ventures a shaky “SINtesh?” Now, if you happen to be an expert in Greek, and are laughing because I have spent twenty-one years also mangling the pronunciation of the name, do me a favor. Keep your expertise to yourself, and stop showing off. I’m not sure whether my dignity (or my daughter’s) could handle that after 21 years of mispronouncing a misspelled name.


Despite this rocky start, she’s done fairly well. The kid is majoring in electrical engineering (just like mom did), but is planning to teach high school or junior high-level math and/or technology (just like mom is). Having volunteered and worked with schools in Baltimore, she has decided that she would like to serve underprivileged children of inner cities.


Unlike me, this child is always well prepared and early to arrive when she goes anywhere. (In all her years of public schooling, she never once missed the bus.) As a matter of fact, that’s how she landed her first summer internship while at Johns Hopkins. There was to be a scholars’ brunch or luncheon on campus in her freshmen year, and we were discussing her intended attire. Should she wear Indian clothes or Western business attire, she wondered? This was a great honor, because with daughters leading our chain of children, I am usually on the receiving end of wardrobe advice. “Mom, why do you keep wearing that?”


She arrived twenty minutes early for a scholarship luncheon for the corporate sponsors, dazzled them in her business suit, and was given a personal introduction and recommendation to the corporation that hired her. One thing led to another, and she is a Student Alumni Ambassador, and was chosen to speak at University events. She’s even on the University’s home web page in a video “We are the very Model of a Modern University,” a spoof on the Gilbert and Sullivan’s “Modern Major General” song from “Pirates of Penzance.” Visit http://modeluniversity.jhu.edu/ and click play. The president of the university is on right after the maniacal-looking blue jay mascot playing the piano, and then Synteche is the one in the bottom right corner of the nine featured students. She’s also there a minute and thirty-five seconds into the video in front of a microscope. Oh, yes – and everyone in there happens to be lip-synching.


Ironically, she was in Fauquier High School’s production of this same musical under the direction of Kevin Mettinger. (Of course, you’re going to see “Hairspray” at the high school this weekend or the next, aren’t you?)


Synteche’s coming home this weekend. You might think it was for her birthday or for Mother’s Day, but it is actually to see the musical at the high school, and it has nothing to do with her younger brother manning the spotlights backstage. A devotee of the stage, she always tries to get home whenever Kevin Mettinger works his directorial magic on stage. Like an expert jeweler, he knows just how to get the students’ talents to shine.


Synteche, who was homeschooled for the greatest number of years, from kindergarten to seventh grade (notice how the eldest child always gets the brunt of things?), was so painfully shy, that she would prefer to nibble her fingers than engage in conversation with anyone. That, by the way, is simply part of her personality, and has nothing to do with homeschooling. The rest of the kids could, and often would, talk people’s heads off. She is the only non-talkative one out of the six. Theater got her out of her shell, and it’s going to get her out of Baltimore this weekend.


Happy 21st Birthday, Synteche! May God bless you as you enter official, full-fledged, adult life.