We’ll Leave the Light on for You

I heard a key turn in the front door lock at 3:30 this morning and I knew it was my son.  He likes to make the 5-hour drive home from college in the middle of the night to avoid interstate traffic.  Actually, he says the ride from out of state is always smooth until he hits New York.  Then it’s mayhem.

We only see him now for holidays and then briefly at that.  He’s a senior with a full course load and a full-time job, always busy planning his next step.  The road to adulthood has been a journey entirely his own and although I was always part of it, over the years I have felt alternately like a bridge and a roadblock; a negotiator and a hostage.

Ever since my kids were past elementary school, I have been out of the house with them in the morning, going to work, always busy.  So when Son walked into the kitchen at 10:00 in the morning and found me at the table drinking coffee and reading the paper in my jammies, his mouth dropped open and his eyes went wide.

“So this is how it is now?” he demanded, eyebrows arched and mouth grinning.  Apparently, my announcement at the end of the summer that I was beginning a self-imposed sabbatical was only so many words until the pajama sighting.

“I’m freelancing,” I sniffed.  He tousled my hair playfully and squeezed my shoulders.  “You deserve it, Mom.  You should take it easy.  You’ve been a great mom.”

In spite of the fact that it sounded like a eulogy, I was deeply touched.  The road to where he is now was not an easy one – either for him or with him – and it is something we can talk about now, he and I.  At 22, he still has the swagger that made more than one teacher from his early years confide to me, “He’s smart and cute and the other kids think he’s the coolest thing but sometimes I just want to kill him.”  Although I always questioned the wisdom and ethics of teachers speaking this candidly to a parent, I nonetheless felt their pain.

But on this day, we sat and chatted about school and work and life.  I told him how proud I was that he made the dean’s list and had been promoted to general manager of the off-campus food franchise he’d worked at since sophomore year.  I asked if he was satisfied with the college student staff of workers he had painstakingly assembled over the summer in preparation for the new school year.  He shrugged.  “They don’t really have my work ethic, y’know?  They’re kids.”

I smiled at the unintended irony and asked him if he’d had to let anyone go yet.  He said, “Sure”, as if it was no big deal.  I was intrigued.
“Really?  You’ve fired people?  How do you fire someone?”
“I tell them not to come back.”
“Just like that?  ‘Don’t come back’?”
“Well, I try and say it so they know what the situation is.  There was this one kid who would show up for the wrong shift or not show up at all.  So after it happened three times I called him up at home and told him we had a problem.  He asked me if I wanted him to switch shifts.  I told him I wanted him to switch jobs.”

Running a business is like walking a tightrope, Son has discovered.  He has to please the customers, manage the workers, answer to the owner and keep an eye on the bottom line.  Sometimes maturity is what happens in between taking final exams and paying the electric bill.

I know I’m not unique in having high hopes for my kids.  We all want our children to have happy lives, fulfilling personal relationships and satisfaction from the work they have chosen.  We cherish the belief that we have given them the foundation to build on and in turn leave their own mark.  And if it turns out that they are the mark that we leave behind, it seems like more than enough.

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