This year has been a year of change for my family and me. And change is good, right? Self-help books and bumper stickers tell me so all the time (unless the “change” we’re talking about has to do with the climate. Then it’s bad. Bumper stickers tell me that, too.) But this week I have had a rough time dealing with all this change. A few days ago, I registered my first baby girl for Driver’s Ed, then my baby boy turned fourteen, and then recently I noticed it’s time for my last baby girl to get a training bra. Add that to the evening I spent watching home movies of “the good ol’ days,” and I've pretty much been crying since last Friday. Everything and everyone is changing. How do I make it stop?
So I was grateful for the phone call I received this morning reminding me that not everything changes—some things, some people, stay the same.
First, let’s go back to another phone call I received in 2006:
“Hello, Mrs. Niemeyer? I’m calling about Jackson,” the school secretary said.
“Is he okay?” I asked, the panic already in full effect because I was raised to worry about anything and everything.
“Oh, he’s fine. He just thought he would be a magician today and make a bead disappear... By sticking it in his ear. And now the school nurse can’t get it out,” she replied, and I could hear her stifling a giggle.
“I’ll be right there,” I said.
But first, I called our pediatrician: “Hi, this is Rachel Niemeyer, I’m calling about Jackson,” I said when Ms. Becky answered the phone.
“Uh oh, what did he shove up his nose this time?” Ms. Becky said.
“Actually, he stuck a bead in his ear. Because he was performing a magic trick,” I threw in the last part thinking it might add a bit of mystique and prestige to the story.
She laughed and told me to come right in. Jackson was infamous at Dr. T’s office for an incident that occurred right before his fourth birthday. During an appointment for an ingrown toe nail, the doctor found a toy cell phone button (the # sign, if you’re curious) lodged securely in his nasal passage. Removing it was quite an ordeal, and to this day, Dr. T still teases Jackson about it.
When I picked up my six year old boy from school, he was more concerned with telling me how his friends thought he was really magic than he was about the trapped bead that was already causing hearing loss.
“Which ear is it, sweetie?” The nurse asked Jackson when he was on the exam table.
“2006,” said my beautiful, smart boy.
Now let’s get back to the phone call I received this morning. Chad called to tell me that while he was at work, Jackson called him from school. After nearly eighteen years of marriage, I have trained Chad to always immediately assume the worst in all situations, so he went into high alert. But Jackson was laughing.
“We had a bit of an adventure today, Dad,” he said.
Instantly, Chad’s mind went to the same place all minds of parents with teenage boys would go: He skipped school. He went out to the woods and did something bad. He’s drunk—he sounds drunk, why is he laughing?
Jackson delivered the bomb: “My friends and I ate packing peanuts."
"What?"
"Ms. Sweet told us we were knuckleheads and made us call you in case we get stomachaches and stuff,” Jackson said.
As Chad told me the story this morning, I envisioned getting a phone call from Jackson’s wife in twenty years. “Mom!” she’ll say, (she’ll call me mom because we’ll be best friends and hang out all the time) “Do you know what your son did?” And she’ll proceed to tell me that my grown boy, in an effort to impress his wife, swallowed/stuck/shoved something somewhere and they were on their way to the hospital.
And I will tell her, “You know, Emily, some people never change.”
