Captain Reverend Mother

Parenting Through the Years Under One Roof

Our fifteen-year-old informed us that we are damaging his “aura.”

We did not know we possessed this power. The list of things damaging his aura includes our presence at his baseball games, any sentence beginning with “when I was your age,” and our beloved hellayella Jeep Wrangler.

(Aura, for those of us who came up on Madonna and Members Only jackets, is the invisible “cool” a teenager believes they give off when they enter a room. My son is trying to build his. We parents are, apparently, the human form of cringe.)

He started a new high school in the middle of freshman year. (That the Navy moves you when the Navy moves you is a particular cruelty of military life.) The friend groups were already set. He walked into a room where everyone knew the script and he did not. So, he is doing what teenagers have done since modern life gave adolescence its own strange pressure: assembling a public self out of hair product, shoe choices, strategic silence, and whatever is “no cap” this week.

He earned his Eagle Scout before the move, thank God and all the saints, because completing it in Italy would have registered on the aura ledger as catastrophic!

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A few years ago, I made a chart on butcher paper. On it is a color and line for each of my immediate family members with the years marching along the bottom in tiny, ticked numbers, out to 2119. Where each life ends in its projected hundredth year, the line stops. The rectangle where our four lives overlap under one roof is shaded blue, ingeniously dubbed, “The Blue Box.”

Our boys have since taken to saying “Blue Box” when they want our full attention. Just those two words, and all of us drop everything for that moment. I love it!

The Blue Box is small. The Blue Box is closing. With our freshman, we maybe have three and a half years left. 

Our youngest son and I read the Hardy Boys at bedtime, one chapter each night. He shows up in pajamas, gets under the blankets, and listens as he fades off to sleep. I know this window is closing too, that one night he will be too old for it. I read slower than I used to.

The younger sons have no concept of a box that keeps getting smaller. They cannot. Time at fifteen, at ten, is inexhaustible, the way water is inexhaustible to anyone who has never lived through drought. A family meal is an interruption. A board game is something parents want and children tolerate.

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This week I checked into my last tour in the United States Navy. Every first day from here until retirement is a last first day. I am familiar enough with the work that it is not a steep climb. The geography, however, is. There is an active conflict, and ministry during active conflict is a different animal than ministry outside it.

The Navy and I have own blue box, but it does not appear on any chart. 2029 will arrive, someone will file the paperwork, and the institution will sail on without sentiment. None of this keeps me up at night.

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My parents were nearly two generations older than me. One died twenty-two years ago; the other, eleven. After a parent dies, you carry them. And I find them everywhere…in the curtain rod I can expertly hang, in the countless hours shuttling the boys to and from sporting events, in the face I see in the mirror that is not entirely mine. I inherited my father’s engineering mind; from my mother, her kindness and, unfortunately, her cooking.

Most mornings my spouse makes breakfast for the four of us. Bacon and hashbrowns for the boys, eggs and oatmeal with a diced apple for me. Our freshman set his phone face down away from the dining room table, eats, leaves, then beelines back to his phone. Our youngest follows suit with his iPad. The whole transaction takes maybe four minutes.

My spouse and I sit with the empty chairs afterward. We are old enough to know those chairs are a small rehearsal. They are practicing leaving. It is the work of growing up. I am their mother. Nobody assigned me that part. I auditioned the day they was born and have been performing without a script ever since. That role has no closing night.

My spouse makes breakfast again the next morning. The boys come down. They set down their devices. They leave in four minutes. 

The Blue Box is filled with breakfasts nobody asked for, with rides refused, with just showing up anyway in case today is the day they look up.

Freshmen think aura is built in a hallway, in the right shoes, hanging with the right people and with the right people watching. They are not wrong. They are just early. Real aura accumulates at a table, in pajamas, in the ordinary work of being loved by people who stay.

Some days our boys look up. Most days they do not. We set the table anyway. The Blue Box is small. I intend to fill it.