Quieter Milestones
On the not-first-days-of-school, other markers of good growth sneak up.
It’s first day of school season, and I’ve seen a lot of front porch posing, backpack toting, and toothy grin beaming in my social media feeds. From summer into fall, from August into September, we see in pictures how much the kids have grown (oh, how they have grown!) and look forward to where they’re heading. It’s kind of like a pictorial fanfare, coloratura choruses catching our eyes and our hearts. We smile and blink past our misting sight: Time is passing! Mark these souls and bodies that are changing and moving!
Our family will start school next week, part of the later wave of this annual, seasonal bittersweet change. But other milestones are happening around here, few of which I saw coming. The unexpectedness of these quieter milestones makes them priceless, for the soft, subtle change is in many ways no less momentous than the milestone change.
Last week, on Tuesday, August 22, 2023, just over fifteen years had passed since our eldest son first breathed oxygen. In the late afternoon, I got home from a swimming outing with a gaggle of kids and reminded our son that he’d volunteered to make burgers for supper, since Jon was at meetings and wouldn’t be home until late. I asked our second oldest son to help out. Then I disappeared to bathe the two-year-old, make sure the younger kids didn’t leave their wet suits on carpet, hang up towels and do a load of laundry. I got a few questions yelled to me, but I wasn’t in the kitchen. I honestly wasn’t even paying much attention to their progress.
When I appeared in the kitchen and looked at the dining room table, there were our youngest three, sitting in their spots with full plates and cups, already eating. “Mom, I have your plate almost ready,” one of the bigger boys said, while our oldest daughter asked if she could get me an iced beverage. I was slightly bewildered at the semi-professionalism happening, this kitchen chaos operating smoothly, and I hadn’t done anything.
I found myself sitting at my customary spot at the table with a plate set before me. Our eldest made the skillet-fried smashburgers thanks to his time this summer working on a local—and Lutheran owned!—food truck. Our second born son sliced the onions, toasted the buns, and made the fry sauce from scratch and no recipe. Our third born son cleaned and sliced all the potatoes and (I think) fried them mostly himself with help from sibs, though he has yet to turn ten. Our eldest daughter made the salad, complete with just the right amount of Caesar salad dressing, poured the drinks, and made sure I had everything I needed. “Do you want extra fry sauce?” she asked me as she placed a cup of the stuff next to my plate. “It’s really good.” Of course I asked for more and was glad I did so—I could almost eat it by itself. After I prayed and ate, the big boys continued to cook while my daughter fussed around, making sure I had a napkin, helping the toddler and the younger kids.
This wasn’t the first time our children had prepared a meal. But it felt different. The hot food was steaming, the salad was cold, the drink was icy. Everything was perfectly seasoned and delicious. That they pulled their efforts together fairly spontaneously and presented a bunch of us with a full, amazing meal was, well, a milestone. It was a big-kids-becoming-young-adults moment, one that I hadn’t anticipated on that day, and one I hadn’t seen coming, even though I’d known even fifteen years ago that a moment like it would come eventually.
How do you measure growth, the good kind of selfless service you hope your children live out regularly as adults? It’s not quantifiable. But it is noticeable.
“I can drive home, Mom,” said our oldest son a few days later, after I’d gone to church to pick him up from an organ practice session. I’d said he could drive there, so I wasn’t surprised he offered. Still, it felt different. Yes, he needs driving practice, and yes, it’s a sacrifice of sorts for his father and I to take the extra minutes to go over things with him and to sit with him as he drives around the neighborhood for a few minutes. Yes, we place ourselves in a position of vulnerability as he learns the touch of the brake and the gas. And yet our son is now physically in the driver’s seat, and it marks a turning of both responsibility and privilege for him and us, too. He alternately grinned and looked pensive as he carefully rolled through quiet streets, the sunlight nearly gone and the headlights gleaming ahead of us on the dark pavement as we approached home. It was the first of many drives like it, I hope.
Two of our other kids are running middle school cross country this late summer into early fall, and their first meet ever was last week on Casper Mountain. The hot days turned suddenly, and we faced heavily misting skies and fifty-five degree weather. While Jon and I and the other kids wore jeans, hoodies, and raincoats, the running kids were shivering in their singlet uniforms and shorts as they lined up for the 3K races.
Cross-country races are fun to attend, if fans are up for a workout while the race goes on. We ran, sometimes sprinting to different parts of the course to get there before our kids so we could cheer them on like maniacs for the few seconds that they passed. I remembered this from decades ago when my sister ran. What I hadn’t experienced was seeing my own children running.
At first, near the beginning of the races, they looked sheepishly pleased as we whooped and hollered at them, little grins playing around their mouths. Later, it was evident that they were working harder, their legs less light and arms less casual in their swing, their faces intent and flushed. By the end, their eyes were blazing pain, their exhaustion clear, their mouths open and hollow as they gasped for breath. And yet, when we encouraged them—“You’re almost there! The finish line is just ahead! Finish strong!”—they immediately mustered up, lengthening their strides, and accelerating.
There are few things more moving to fathers and mothers, I think, than seeing our children in very evident physical pain push themselves to keep going. We want them to run their races, to use their hands and bodies, to sweat and hurt, not because we’re masochists, but because we know how suffering produces character in the flesh and in the spirit. As I yelled at our son and daughter, tears brimming in my eyes as they flailed and struggled and tried to sprint, I knew that these were yet other milestones, ones in which perseverance begins to be carved on their souls for the God-willing long races ahead of them.
Next week we will take our first day of school pictures, kids cheesing in their clean, new uniforms and squeaky new shoes. We will gladly and thankfully mark yet another common and obvious milestone. And we will also cherish the quieter milestone moments that happen, in the kitchen, in the car, in the rain, and whenever in time they come.