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Parenting Never Ends
And neither do the surprises
On New Year’s Eve, my husband and I spent the evening watching shows on a streaming service we didn’t have at home. At midnight, he remarked on the time, and we wished each other a happy new year. It was uneventful. Shortly afterwards, we went to bed.
We were housesitting for a friend who lives in a nearby city; one of our sons is renting a room there, but he was out for the evening, having better things to do than hang out with us, the grey-haired parents he landed with late in life.
The next day he wasn’t home by late morning and my mother’s intuition kicked in.
He has a girlfriend, and I first assumed they were asleep in his bed, his room the place they appeared to spend a lot of time. Eventually, I knocked on the door, and when no one answered, I opened it up. The bed was made (he’s a tidy young man) and not slept in.
I wondered if they were at her place or with some other friend but that seemed uncharacteristic. He’s long past the stage where he tells me if he’s coming home at night; I’ve worked past imagining my kids are dead in a ditch whenever I don’t hear from them.
I have too many kids to entertain those fears without losing my mind. Now that none of them live at home there are more variables in their lives than I could…
