First-teen

 Dearest Spencer,

Here we are again, at the end of another era, the beginning of another milestone, an old familiar, but oh so different place than we were 365 days ago.

Tonight, you close off your first dozen years and you will wake up as an official teenager.

Not kid, not pre-teen, but a teenager.

Wow.

I know I’ve been calling you a “teen” for a few months now and joking about rounding up, but it hits so much harder tonight. 

We have talked many times about how we are both learning as we go, growing as we go, and figuring this journey out together, and it still rings true.  I finally feel like I have a decent grasp on having big kids instead of little kids, instead of toddlers, instead of babies, and here we are, a new juncture, and it’s off to the races as we veer into the years of having teenagers.  You’re the forerunner, obviously.  I hope that the years are good to us, the disagreements and stresses are few and are between, and the laughter and hugs are countless.

Realistically, I know it won’t likely be all wildflowers, sunshine and rainbows, but I pray that it’s more wildflowers, sunshine and rainbows that torrents, deluges, and gale forces. I pray that it’s more dancing than falling, that’s for sure.

It has been such a joy watching you grow and transform before my eyes.  I have been reliving old photos and videos at night lately, thinking about how you were the answer to my biggest prayer- that I could be a momma.  I think about how your blue eyes have sparkled looking back at mine for the past dozen years, and how familiar that is to me, and how it ignites sparks inside my heart.  

Watching your personality blossom has been another treasure to me.  I remember when you were so much younger, and it was harder to tap into “your brave” and there were many things you just wouldn’t do.  There were many things you wouldn’t do alone, but you were braver with me by your side.  I was your steady and your charge when you were hesitant or leery of whatever was going on around you or what was being asked of you.  Your meek, little voice still echoes in my head.

But now… I’ve recently come to the realization that you may be braver without me.  I think about the fact that you were ready and willing to attend three different camps or retreats this past summer, with three different groups of people, in three different states, all without me, all with very little contact to me, and how you flourished and thrived and each one chiseled you into the young man you are turning into, a little bit at a time.  I loved seeing you again for the first time, each time, and how you would come to me, arms wide open, with a huge grin, and tell me you missed me.  It was unexpected each time, but they were threes heaven-sent moments. 

Another thing that has been a delight in regard to those excursions, is hearing other people tell me how wonderful they think you are.  You were reported to be very kind, thoughtful, hilarious, and fun.  Many of us have enjoyed watching you come out of your shell more and more. (As a side note, have I told you that I am so proud of you for starting to let more people “in” on all areas of your life including your thoughts, emotions, fears, joys, and triumphs?  I am.  You have spent many years guarding these parts of yourself, for reasons I do understand, but you’ve been slowly breaking down your walls, and it’s a magnificent thing to experience.)

As I realized these things recently, you and I had a discussion about how you feel more relaxed and open going to youth group nights by yourself, instead of with me there.  Surprisingly enough, it didn’t hurt my feelings at all, but made me so proud of you for your honesty and bravery.  You’ve climbed quite the hill in your years, and it’s amazing to see you reaching the pinnacle and I cannot wait to see where you go when you get closer. I don’t know if one every really reaches the hypothetical summit, but if you do, I’ll be here cheering you on for that as well.

In another side of your personality, I love listening to you experiment with your instruments.  I cannot tell you how big I grinned when I heard you play a little diddy on guitar that sounded like the solo to my favorite song. Your teachers at school all tell me how great you are as well, and that they are proud of you.  I know, personally, music is one of my best friends, like a cozy blanket that understands me no matter what my mood or life circumstance is.  I feel that it may be similar for you as well.  One thing that you possess that I don’t though, is the ability to pull music out of thin air, play by ear, or goof around and have it still sound good. I might be a tiny bit jealous in that aspect. 

Lately, I’ve been trying to give you more independence and trust, inch by inch, because you are older and should be gaining more responsibility and independence as we go along, but sometimes, that’s hard for me, and I apologize if I come off as overprotective or untrusting.  The world we live in continues to change into one that seems crazier and more uncertain than the one I grew up in, and I’m always trying to navigate how that should look so far as parenting goes.  As you know, and have said in the past, I’m pretty much doing it myself, and often I second guess or doubt myself and whether I am doing it right, or good enough, and so forth.  Thank you for being patient with me.  (I will admit, however, that I love the moments where you’re not “too cool” or “too old” to do things that are still whimsical and fun.  Tonight, for example, we had the perfect balance of going trick-or-treating with family, but then the independence to go again on your own for a while.)

With that said, I promise to continue to try to extend my own patience with you. I know there are times when I am less than patient and certainly not perfect in how I approach things.  I joke occasionally about how I was once a middle school or teenage girl, but I was never a middle school or teenage boy, so I don’t always know how to decode what you’re hinting at and I don’t often quite understand what you’re feeling.  I will continue to try to learn the balance between giving you privacy, but also holding you accountable.  Clearly, this stage of our lives is going to be a work in progress, possibly the entire time.

Spencer, I think you’re truly amazing, and the world is so blessed to have you in it.  I have loved watching your faith start growing in different ways, trying new things, and enjoying new experiences.  I loved getting you a Bible this summer, and each time you tell me about a verse or story you’ve found interesting brings me even more joy.  Thank you for what you’re willing to share, and know I understand that a faith life is personal too, and I respect that I cannot and will not always get to know everything.  That’s new to me too.  I’m so used to the little kid information overload that the preteen and teenage withholding feels a bit foreign still.

Thank you for loving like you do.  Thank you for giving me hugs for no reason, out of nowhere, and when I’m sad.  Thank you for all the fun we have in the car going to or from school, and for obliging when I ask too many questions about your day.  Thank you for your wonderful sense of humor that feels so much like my own, and for the respect you show asking if you can tell jokes before just blurting them out.  That probably seems or sounds silly, but it just shows me that you respect boundaries of others.

Thank you for going out of your way to help others, whether it is you giving a little of your spending cash to another student on a trip, or respectfully assisting someone who may be less physically agile due to injury, age, illness, or other reasons.  I have heard accounts of both of these things, and many others, when they’ve happened and I’m not around.  There’s nothing quite like hearing something wonderful your child did when they didn’t need to impress or prove anything to others.  Thank you for holding doors and carrying in one more grocery bag yourself so I don’t have to- without being asked.  

As bittersweet as it is to see you continue to grow up, I am truly excited to see what the future holds.  I don’t want to say goodbye to the childhood years where you need more care than independence, more cuddles than thumbs up, but I know it’s going to be a beautiful thing as you continue to grow older and our relationship starts to take on more friendship qualities as well.  

Thanks for the abundance of random information that you spout out with no rhyme or reason.  Believe it or not, I do the same thing to others.  

I pray this year brings you boundless laughter, new favorite songs, interesting additional friends, and a real sense of who you are, as a child of God, a son of mine, a brother, a grandson, a nephew, and a friend.  You are a delight to me, even on our harder days.  

Love you more,

Mom (not Bruh)

A Familiar Loss of a Different Kind

On Monday, morning, October 9, 2023, my dear friend, Buffy Sue, passed away unexpectedly in her home.

I have lost friends and family before, numerous times.  This loss, however familiar in some ways, is unique and different compared to those in the past.  This feels like new territory in some respects.

During my adolescent years, the internet was just starting to really become common and accessible.  In my tenth grade year, I joined a website for teens with journals, games, polls, messaging, and so forth.  It started out as somewhat of a social experiment in my mind, as well as an exciting way to explore new territory with people my age, all over the globe.  I had a MySpace page, where I found friends and new music, taught myself some basic HTML and photo editing skills, downloaded ICQ and AIM messengers, and continued to make connections.  It didn’t take long before I was fully immersed in the website I first mentioned, making friendships and relationships that many adults at the time would tell you were not and could not ever be real, true, lasting friendships.  It seemed absurd that you could have a relationship with someone you had never met. I grew up in a tiny town with amazing “real-life” friendships, as I would have referred to them at the time.  These online friends were no substitute, they were an addition to my tribe.

That website was the beginning of my online journaling (now called blogging) endeavor, and I wrote almost every day.  At one point, I had journaled every day for one or two years.  I honestly cannot even recall. I had friends that read daily, commented daily, and I reciprocated in their journals.  As we got older, we started chatting, emailing, writing letters, sending text messages, and sometimes even meeting in person.  While it may seem shocking to believe, I have made some of my most trusted friends on that website, and they know me, the real me, and love me in return, and we have had these relationships for twenty-some years.  They’ve been by my side, figuratively speaking, through high school, high school graduation, boyfriend breakups, college, college graduation, engagement, wedding, marriage, infertility, deaths in my family, births of children, betrayal from my husband, divorce, single-parenting, covid, overcoming, and so many more events in my last twenty years.

In 2012, after giving birth to one son in 2010, then losing a pregnancy in 2011, I became pregnant again and was due with our next child in August.  At the time, I was working an in-home daycare with one of my best friends, with a husband who worked long hours out of town and was away a lot.  I joined a pregnancy app on my phone, which came with message boards.  Those message boards were a bit rudimentary, and it wasn’t long after that an August 2012 Momma Facebook group was formed.  So many women around the globe joined that group, and we shared so much of our lives together.  That group still exists, and while it’s not as frequently utilized, we mommas are there and we still love each other.  Some have been fortunate enough to meet in person, and many of us developed deeper side friendships with mommas we really connected with, and have kept in touch in multiple other ways.  When we had our babies, we were there.  When they turned one, we were there.  When we have had triumphs and joys, we were there.  When lives turned unexpectedly upside down, we were there.  It is a core group that you know is going to be there even if it’s been a year and you need to rant about something related to motherhood, you need prayers or advice for any other topic, or you’re in a crisis and you don’t know what to do.  It’s been such a joy watching our children grow up together, even if we are not physically together.

This momma group is where I met Buffy Sue.  

Buffy Sue was absolutely my closest friend in that group.  She brought me such joy.  Her laughter was contagious and when she would get laughing, I may not even understand really what she was laughing about (because sometimes she would be laughing so hard her words didn’t sound comprehensible) but it would get me laughing, too.  She gave great advice when I needed it.  She said stupid funny things when I needed comic relief.  She sent me pictures and videos of herself and her daughters frequently.  She told me all about her coffee shop, when things were going well, when things would unexpectedly break down and cause messes, when things were going splendidly, all of it.  I always told her I wished she could deliver MY coffee, but joked that it would probably taste a little funky by the time it arrived, so she would just have to drink what I would order in my honor.  She blessed my children and I in big  and little ways, from surprises in the mail, to silly letters, and much, much more.  She helped me see straight through tears of confusion and anger when my marriage was falling apart.  She reminded me how strong I was, and how I was never really going crazy even if I thought it might be the case.  She encouraged and supported all my creative endeavors.  She was a champion for everyone she loved and so many other she barely even knew.  She would do anything she could to better someone’s life- not just mine.  I tried my very best to do the same for her in her life, and I can only pray that I made an as much an impact on her as she did on me.  As I’ve been reading tributes to her online, I am blown away, but also not really surprised, by the impact she made on her community, but even further, around the world.

When I read last night that she was gone, it felt like I was being punched in the chest.  I turned off my phone screen multiple times, feeling like I was just imagining what the screen said.  When I realized it was true, I wept quietly in my room, away from my sons.

You see, they didn’t really know Buffy.  They knew of her, because I would show them videos or photos sometimes when they’d ask what was so funny, but they never really met her.

That’s when I realized, in a way, I had never really met her, either.  Well, not in person, anyway.

That thought struck me in the strangest way, as I then wrestled with my own thoughts.  That lasted much of the night, and I cried myself to sleep, still feeling sort of strange to be feeling as sad as I was.

Today is my day off from work, so after I took my two littles to elementary school, my oldest and I carried out our day-off tradition.  I drive him across town to middle school, but on our way, we stop at a coffee shop of his choosing, and we play “coffee roulette” where I let him order a drink for me (so long as it is not straight up black coffee or espresso) and he chooses a bakery item for himself.  When we were picking up our items from the drive through window, I started to feel tears welling up in my eyes.  As we pulled away, I blurted out to him, “one of my online momma friends died this week.”

He was stunned.  He stared at me for a moment before he said “that is so tragic and I am really sorry, mom.”

I told him how I didn't want to burden them with my loss, and how I nearly broke down this morning when I realized if I sent her the goofy Snapchat photo I was sending some friends of our cat trying to get involved in non-cat-related activities she wouldn't ever open it anyway.

I began to tell him about Buffy and all of her great qualities.  I told him how she was really “Steve the Elf” a couple years ago who sent us tickets to For King and Country’s Christmas concert locally.  He laughed about it a while and then told me how she sounded so cool and it made all the sense in the world that we were friends.

“We really were friends,” I said, trailing off a little.  

I finally began talking aloud about all the conflicting thoughts I had been feeling the night prior- how could I possibly be so sad when I had never even been in the same room as her?  How could I be devastated knowing I wouldn’t get to hug her in person when we still hadn’t had that chance?  How could she possibly have left such a lasting impression on me when she was so far away?  

He and I then talked about how it absolutely makes sense that I was so sad.  She was real.  She was a real friend. She knew me better than many people.  Just because we had never been in the same place geographically, she was with me so often, in a few second spurts, day in and day out.  We shared each other’s triumphs.  We shared sorrow when her dad died.  We laughed when we would say or do stupid things.  We shared music.  We shared a friendship.

He and I then had a great talk about how you really can create life-long, true, deep relationships with people you have never met, but how you also have to be careful in letting people online into your life sometimes, especially with sensitive information.

I explained how I have two groups of real-life-online-friends, those who are still in my life from high school, and those who came into my life as a momma, and are still in my life today.  He knows I have amazing friendships with some of these.  He began asking me questions about many of them, and I got to tell him stories about how one friend and I would write a fiction blog about a world where we were actually together, and another friend and I would fill up a notebook with multiple letters before sending it off, and how I met one in Nashville, and stayed with one in Brooklyn, and met up with two in Omaha, and one came to Sioux Falls.

He told me I was a really great friend.  He wiped away my tears and reminded me he loved me.

As he got out of the car and I drove away, the song “Banks” by Needtobreathe came on the car stereo, and it brought me right back to Buffy, and the type of life she lived and the way she loved fiercely.

I was watching the sun rise above the trees, alone again with my thoughts and my sorrow.  I had finished my coffee, and remembered that my favorite local coffee drink, the Honey Bee Latte, was half price at that time in the morning, and I had enough pocket change in my cup holder to stop and grab one. I wasn’t quite ready to go home and sit with my thoughts yet, because my emotions were still swirling.  So, I stopped and ordered my favorite, one I had told Buffy about long ago, and decided to go to the outdoor campus here in town and go for a walk.  I dove deeper into my thoughts and emotion and decided that I needed to write.

I always find that I need to write.

This time, it was a little different.

I realized that I could search all over for a physical place where I felt my friend and I were together, but when it came down to it, the living room of our friendship was really the internet.  It was in writing, mostly.  I knew I needed to come sit on the virtual couch of our friendship and feel the emptiness in that room, and embrace the love I had for her in this life, through the screen in front of me.   I walked a couple of miles until my coffee was gone, with the gentle wind blowing through the trees, thinking about the songs she might send my way on a day like this, what joke she would make, and if her Honey Bee Latte would be even tastier.  I believe it would have been, no contest.  

So here I am, writing my heart out, wondering what she would say if she saw all of these words before us.  She would downplay her own significance for a while, but tell me how much she loved me, and turn it right around and build me up, because that’s what kind of champion she was.

This sorrow I feel is like that of any other friend or family I’ve lost, but different in that unfamiliar ache of the in-person hug I won’t get on this side of heaven.  As I sit through the grief, I realize this won’t be the first time on this path, because I am so blessed someday, potentially (unless I go, first) lose many more I love so deeply in this way.

My sorrow must only be a fraction of the sorrow felt by her mother, her siblings, her husband, her beautiful daughters, and her countless friends.  I’ll be thinking of them often and praying for their piece as they live out the immeasurable grief I’m sure they must be feeling.  I’ll continue to read the tributes to her online, and count myself so fortunate to have a treasure like her in my lifetime.  

I know you’re singing with the angels, Buffy, love.

Until someday,

-Me