There’s a pumpkin sitting next to my yard waste bin that’s been there since late fall. It greets me every evening when I arrive home. It’s Roy’s. That is, it was the pumpkin that we purchased for him that he failed to carve. On the evening that we carved pumpkins, an evening of cherished family tradition, Roy was busy. Was he working? On a date with his girlfriend? I don’t recall. He was living fully into the life that characterizes liberated adolescents.
The pumpkin has become a symbol of my grief. Not the bad kind of grief–I don’t regret that Roy was not there to carve pumpkins with us this year–but a grief that acknowledges the natural separation that is appropriately growing up between him and Lindsay and me. A grief that has the wisdom to accept what is as what should be. I’ve been warned by veteran parents that something erupts between the adolescent-parent relationship in the adolescents’ last years at home. An eruption characterized by absence and friction. I was told not to worry about the absence and friction because it’s a natural occurrence in the relationship. Some went as far as citing evolutionary instinct to describe the phenomena. With Roy, we’ve had absence, but no friction. He is, as is often the case with compliant firstborns, a delight.
But the pumpkin– it feels, to me, like the empty bedroom that will be vacated when he leaves for college. Like a Thomas the Tank Engine packed away in our attic. Uncarved, the lonely pumpkin illuminates the life of my little boy that is no more. It testifies to a life so full of possibility–the possibility of FAFSA applications, paystubs, Facetime calls, and late-night Chick-Fil-A dinners after youth group–that that life now must steward its time with intent.
The pumpkin also reminds me that at some moment in our past we celebrated a last time together. The likelihood that Roy will ever carve pumpkins with us again is slim. In fact, it’s more likely that the next time he carves a pumpkin he will be with his own child.
August is coming. I can see it now, having broken through the horizon. I know that when it arrives, we will cross a threshold marked by goodbyes that signify not just the physical distance between us, but the end of a posture of a certain kind of dependence. That posture of dependence, which in its infancy took the form of an immediate need for his mother’s milk, evolved into the need for all kinds of things. Uno partner. Soccer cheering section. Homework advisor. And most recently, confidant, a role that I cherish and also recognize as the surest sign that the posture of dependence is waning. Our conversations are marked both by content and vocabulary of increasing consequence. Roy is growing up into a world that is his, not ours.
So why not wait to reflect on this until August? I have a Jungian typology tool and a therapist that have both diagnosed me with an inability to recognize my emotions in the present. In this way I’m at war with myself most days. W.H. Auden said, “I know nothing, except what everyone knows – if there when Grace dances, I should dance.” I sense that pumpkin doesn’t just confront me, but that it is a mechanism of grace inviting me to dance in the cathedral of my emotions. And so today I’m writing to tell you I see what is happening in the life of my son. I see him. And he is home under my roof, today. And that is enough.
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