For A While

“They’re only yours for a while.” I heard that so many times when my children were very young. Everyone told me that I would raise my children but then I had to let them go. Now I’m a bit of a hardheaded person, sometimes a little stubborn, and I was determined to beat the nay-sayers. My kids would always be mine!

I remember when my son was in first grade. Other mothers had warned me that when the kids reached first grade the teachers wanted to cut the parents out. “You won’t have access to his classroom,” one mother told me. “You just drop them at the front door and they’re gone,” another chimed in. I had this image of an ogre teacher standing at the doorway of the classroom waiting to steal my baby boy. Well, somehow I managed to wiggle in. I was determined to walk my son to his class each morning and get him settled for his day. And I was successful! For the first week of school, I would walk him to his classroom, put his lunch on the shelf, his coat on the rack and get his work out on his desk for him. Then I would kiss him on the cheek and tell him to have a wonderful day and that Mommy loved him.

One morning after the first week of school, the teacher said, “Mrs. Jarman, Tim can take care of those things. He’s in the first grade and is big enough to take care of himself.” I looked at my son, who sheepishly nodded in agreement. I didn’t know what to do. Flustered, I kissed him on the cheek and I left. “How dare she?” I said to myself once I had reached the car. “He’s my son,” I thought. Each day after that, I would check with my son to see if everything was going well. Had that brut of a teacher said or done anything that might have upset him? “No, Mom,” he always replied, “school is great!”

Years passed and my son somehow managed on his own at school. I spent many hours a week as a parent volunteer, but he got himself to class and unpacked each day all by himself…through middle school and high school. Somewhere along the way, my son decided he wanted to go to a military school, a service academy. I remember a parent meeting we attended for one of the academies and a mother of a cadet at the school spoke. “They take your kid,” she said. “They become a part of the service and you never get them back.” Tears rolled down my cheeks in the car on the way home. How could I let him go to such a horrid place? Would they really take my child?

As luck would have it, my son applied to and was accepted at the U.S. Coast Guard Academy. We were notified in January of his senior year. For six months I agonized over the theft of my child. “You never get them back” rang through my brain. I sat through his graduation with a pit in my stomach. I had less than a month until the grand theft. The day before the crime, we drove eight long hours to Connecticut. I put on the face of a cheerful mother, proud of her son’s accomplishments and ready to see him off on a great adventure. But inside, I was wailing. They were going to take my son. My baby.

We left him in Connecticut on a pleasant June afternoon. He seemed eager to begin his swab summer experience. I worried. Would he be all right? Would they feed him? Would they be nice to him? It was a long four weeks before we saw him again. We received a few letters from him. Some were upbeat, others were not. But he was making it, surviving the pressures of an intense summer program.

When we saw him in July, he looked so handsome in his uniform. He stood tall and proud as he introduced us to members of his company. Then the realization came to me. They had indeed stolen my son. My boy was gone. But I wasn’t sad. I wasn’t even angry. There I stood in the presence of a proud young man, a young man who was preparing to serve his country. And I was so proud and happy that he had been mine, for a while.