Capturing the Moments

Living with a young teenager is like living with a large blue-eyed alien. Some days he’s still momma’s little boy and wants to sit on the couch and hang out. More often than not, he texts on his cell phone to his girlfriend, plays video games or just hangs out with friends that are definitely not mom and dad.
My son is one of the most awesome people I know. He gets great grades, his teachers all think that he is a wonderfully polite student and he has a true heart for God. But the more he grows up, the more I feel like I am losing my baby. Which I am fully aware needs to happen. We are raising him to be an independent young man. One that is caring and thoughtful, but will be a responsible citizen when he grows up and won’t be living in our basement when he’s forty.

So that is the great conundrum. Holding on to my precious child while watching him grow up to be a great adult. While we still have a few years to go, I realize how precious the moments are when we do actually connect without him rolling his eyes and wondering how he is ever related to us. Tonight was one of those nights.
We have one computer that is the official “downloading of songs” computer. Every now and again I go in to see what my son or husband has downloaded and send those songs to my iPod. Tonight I was the one downloading songs from iTunes and my son came up and asked what I was doing. Cue the “my parents are lame” look when I told him I was downloading some great music. I was insistent and said that he should just listen to what I was downloading. My current genre of the moment is hard rock Christian music (yes there is such a thing). So I played him some of my “head banging” music, a group called Skillet, and he decided it “wasn’t bad” and asked if I had ever heard of his favorites such as Green Day. For over an hour we sat there swapping songs, looking up music videos and laughing at the fact that his mother actually knew some of the lyrics. He didn’t even complain when I started dancing around the room. He almost joined me, but not quite.
After a while, I realized that we both needed to get to bed. I was hesitant to let the moment go. I can see them getting fewer and fewer and want to just hold on to each precious moment and keep them in some sort of mental scrapbook. I want my son to grow up. I want him to become whatever he wants to be. I also want him to stay my baby. So for now, I will relish in the fact that he just walked in to beg me to do his laundry, late at night, for what he has to wear to school tomorrow. Knowing that way too soon, he will have to “relate” to his own children. I hope he gets the opportunity with them to share music and laughter and will enjoy the sheer act of embarrassing them greatly. To know how great every moment of a child’s life is. To know that even the dull ordinary moments can be something extraordinary.