This little delusion is the first lap in the marathon of parental milestone chasing. Everything in our lives is measured and captured. First poop, first words, first recognition of appendages, and even our dietary milestones. As an infant, the milestones are day to day. The older we get, they tend to spread out over years, and eventually, decades. Somehow, me getting to work on time at age thirty-two doesn't exactly necessitate that my parents dance around the living room proclaiming my brilliance.....sadly.
It cracks me up, and is a little confusing, every time I see one of those wacky commercials for a revolutionary product that will supposedly teach calculus to a two year old. I mean, every parent surely knows the importance of your infant's ability to design a suspension bridge! Meanwhile, the kid still craps in his pants. I don't get it. Why has the parenting world somehow forgotten the importance of the natural maturation process. No house has ever been built roof first. There is no reason to rush toward milestones. One day they will only exist in blurry pictures and even blurrier memories.
Not surprisingly, some of the milestones of my life were surrounded in humorous and somewhat uncomfortable situations.
I'm the youngest of four children. As I've written before, I'm much younger than my siblings. In 1985 I was six years old, while they were fifteen, sixteen, and nineteen. Most everything I learned at an early age stemmed from my eavesdropping on teen and adult conversations. I tried my darnedest to make sense of the world far before I should've. This sprint towards understanding came to a head one fateful night during a forty-five minute car ride.
My oldest sister, Diann, attended Jones County junior college in 1985. The school was about forty-five minutes from our home. I'm not sure what type of performance she was involved in, but whatever it was, it required the attendance of my mom and I. So, we loaded up in mom's BOAT of an Oldsmobile, and hit the road. My memories of this night are somewhat blurry, but that car is cemented in my mind. It was a dull red monster of a car, with a bench seat in the front, and a door that was three times my body weight.
Only a few miles down the road, my mother's peaceful drive became traumatic as I turned and asked, "so mom, santa claus isn't real is he?" She paused and then resolutely confirmed my suspicions. I remember her asking if it made me sad. If I remember correctly, I was more satisfied that this knowledge would certainly propel me into early adulthood. No more kiddie tables for this guy!
Once the seal was broken, I couldn't be stopped. For this day would bring about a reckoning. Over the next few interstate exits, we covered my conclusions on the actual state of the world. Santa was only the first victim of this conversation. His death was soon followed by both the tooth fairy and the easter bunny. With every question I grew stronger and sat a little taller, while my mom slinked into her driver's seat unable to come to grips with the reality that so many of her last child's milestones were collapsing at once. At this point she could barely look at me. She stared forward at the road as if her next glimpse would certainly find me sprouting whiskers and singing bass.
That's when she made the near fatal mistake of inquiring if I had any more questions. In fact, I did. I took a few seconds to get the wording just right, then turned to her and asked, "mom, what is sex?"
Now look, I have to give my mom some credit. She remained surprisingly calm as her blood pressure spiked to life-threatening levels. The blood rushed from her face and she quietly responded with, "well, (enormous gulp) what do you think it is?" I then began to explain, in a very elementary fashion, the fractured logic that I'd pieced together from many random conversations. As my skewed explanation reached a crescendo, my mom did the only thing her sanity would allow her to do. She diverted. She nodded her head and assured me that I was right, all the while praying that my questions would cease or that the exit for the college would come soon.
Satisfied with my understanding of human biology, I stepped out of that car a new man. "Good. Now that we got that out of the way, I can certainly turn my attention toward world peace." My mom, on the other hand, was scarred. Her disappointment had turned to horror. Her legs were weak and no eye contact would be had as we sat through my sister's program. I can only imagine that she was somehow trying to figure out a graceful way to explain to my dad the traumatic events that transpired during our trip. Poor thing.
Post Script - My crude concept of human sexuality would lead to a very embarrassing scene some years later. I only remember sitting in my seventh grade health class, eyes as wide as saucers and hands trembling as I silently mouthed the words "SHUT UP."
The following years were relatively vacant of milestones, as I'd rushed through so many at a young age. During these years I focused on music. I played trumpet and sang. In junior high, I attended our local church, and was a member of the youth choir. At this young age, pre-puberty, I sang soprano. My voice was very childlike and I was more than happy to sing anything Bro. Von Kanel put in front of me. In those days, churches regularly participated in youth choir tours. This mostly involved traveling to a nearby state, singing in their local churches, and leading vacation bible school during the day.
This particular year, I was selected as the protagonist in the musical and was given a few critical solos throughout the score. For the first few churches we visited I sang my songs, in the intended keys, and did pretty well, for the most part. However, at some point during the middle of the week I began to feel a hoarse feeling in my throat. Something wasn't right. The more I tried to clear my throat, the worse it got. For some reason, those high notes that were once so clear, were now miles away.
Over the next couple of days I went from having a slight, soprano voice to a disturbingly low bass voice. The disturbing part comes when you consider what the members of the congregation saw. Out on the stage would walk this tiny little kid, with a suspiciously symmetrical bowl shaped hair cut. Expecting a mouse of a voice, they were shocked to hear something that more resembled a record player that was too low on batteries. My cute little upbeat songs, were not droning along like a funeral dirge. The pleasant smiles of the churchgoers were replaced with a combination of confusion and boredom. I was literally singing grown adults to sleep. It's hard to lift people's spirits when they are terrified that the performer may, in some way, be possessed by the devil.
These days, I'm thankful that most of my milestones have passed. I'm more than happy to age uneventfully and focus my attention on the milestones of my kids. But I swear to the Lord, if Jackson catches me alone in the car, and begins asking too many questions, I'm going to just pull the car over and walk.
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