 My 23 year old daughter and I were visiting my 21 year old son for the weekend recently…..(They like to stay anonymous, so for this story, they are named “Danielle” and “Griffin.”) I gotta pause to soak this in for just a moment - 21, young man in 2025 era – first time living away from home, first time working a “real job”, first time depending only on himself for driving anyplace, first time paying rent, first time first time first time. I am in awe that he came out of me a tiny baby and now, dark haired and taller than me, he is putting on a button shirt, slacks, and reporting to work doing back-end coding in computer languages I will never know how to speak. Daily. Woah. Soaking it in. OK, now I am back in his apartment. A one-bedroom bachelor pad in Oklahoma, a 7 hour drive or short flight from Houston. It has grey floors, a decent kitchen and living room area, and a nice view of big sky and nearby house rooftops. On Saturday we binge-watched Brooklyn 9 9 on Peacock, complete with belly laughs and eye rolls together. I cleaned like a tornado-maid while Griffin and Danielle went to the video game store and mall. I like the workout room at his complex because it is a few steps away and I got to work my triceps, plus dance to my Spotify playlist with no audience. Woohoo! Upon my return, I happened to look up at the light hanging over his PC. The base of the hanging light looked about ¼ inch off. “Huh, that’s weird, oh well," is all I thought. Then I enjoyed the pizza my son had made - by hand! Well, since Griffin’s birthday was coming soon, on Sunday I picked up a little Confetti-flavor Cake at Walmart and promised to make Annie’s white cheddar mac-n-cheese. To our little clan, it is like “crack in a box”, practically addictive; SO good. Anyhow, when dinner time rolled around, I got the noodles boiling, and heard “whomp”. Griffin and I turned to look. To our surprise, the light fixture had popped out, dangling from the lovely textured drywall of the ceiling. I suddenly envisioned the fixture falling all the way down, taking 3 feet of drywall with it. I did not pause to consider the fact that this was NOT actually happening, and gasped. Griffin looked at the PC that sat underneath that light. He had worked hard to buy and assemble it during his COVID-quarantine-style Senior year of high school. I assume my gasp added anxiety to the room. He said, “Oh no oh no oh no!” When I heard that, my Mom-heart forgot how grown up he is now and reverted to “rescue mode”. I gathered Danielle and a chair, then proclaimed we HAD to take the whole thing down to prevent disaster. I unscrewed the base. Well, looky there, the fixture then hung by long wires. We could not see how to detach that mess. Griffin was like, “We gotta get the PC out of the way”, I was like “We gotta get this thing off, Danielle, hold this, Griffin, hold that”. We tried, including standing on furniture and almost falling on our butts. But we could not figure it out. Finally, I came to my senses and admitted this was not my area-of-expertise. We decided to call someone who knows about mechanical things: Dad. We sent photos, facetimed, and he said (calm as a summer day), “It was fine before. It is really no big deal, they probably just did not screw it in the right spot. Just put it back how it was and it will be fine until the apartment staff can repair it.” "Arg," I thought, and bonked myself on the forehead. "You went overboard lady, but now you gotta reign it back in for the sake of your offspring." We teamed up to get it screwed back in. Phew. Danielle was like, “I am now staying out of it”, retreating to her Sudoku and Youtube. Griffin moved his PC to another spot, clicked in a repair ticket on his laptop, then chilled out. We all took a moment to breath. I was not proud of my panic-mode, so I admitted it. We really did move on quickly. For that I feel proud. We savored some Mac-n-Cheese, then realized there was no lighter or matches. So, Danielle rolled up a paper towel, dipped it in oil, and made a flame on the electric stove burner. Creativity at its best-and funny. It was fun to sing happy birthday in this new space with my grown up kids. That was some damn tasty cake too. We played an ACTUAL hands on board game and chatted about life a bit. That night, when I curled up on the second-hand couch to sleep, I knew I would miss Griffin in the upcoming week, but he had to keep doing things independently. When the kids were little, time seemed to pause. Their little kid versions seem fixed in time somehow. Now that they are adulting, it seems like there are two parallel universes going on. And somehow I know, in the one where they are grownups, they will fix their own problems.... copyright Lynn Jodeit Ouellette, 2025 | ___Says it better than I can. |
