Tag: Childrearing

“And Mom and Dad Were Still Here…”

I was cleaning over the weekend, and what inevitably happens, happened. I found an old camera. I fired it up and checked out the old pics that were in it, some from last year and some even further back. I found this one. I knew I didn’t take it, but thought maybe Eugene did. I posted it on the Russian River Memories Facebook page where my brother, Mike, remembered the photo and took the credit. A beautiful picture, a beautiful memory from late August 2017. My brother commented, “August 24, 2017, before the fire…and Mom and Dad were still here.” That was all it took for the wave to hit.

“Try to remember the kind of September
When life was slow and oh, so mellow
Try to remember the kind of September
When grass was green and grain was yellow…“

Ahhh, September…a time to remember. And, boy, this photo and that comment had me hurling back like in a time machine movie to a time when my parents were alive. Hurling back to the last licks of summer at the river – splashing, swimming or sitting in the sun – either when I was a kid or when I had kids, “…and Mom and Dad were still here.” The two people who walked the farthest with me on this earthly journey. (Mary might beat them though.) I miss them. I even miss my dad…as curmudgeonly as he was. I certainly miss him during football season.

Ironically, as I was recently watching videos of the tragedy of September 11th, I was telling one of my daughters about it. Then I realized, she hadn’t even been born yet. And the others were so young. Between the two instances, the above photo with my brother’s heart-wrenching comment and the conversation about 9/11, I felt like I was on this cosmic boundary (kinda like Janus) remembering people who are no longer here, and realizing the people I live with were not alive just 23 years ago. Am I making sense?

In 2017, when the photo was taken, my parents were “still here” and all my children had been born as well as three of my grand-kids. There are three more grand-kids who didn’t get to meet them. New people. New personalities. Descendants.

I am an autumn person, and reminiscing and remembering, (while listening to sad folks songs) is my cup of tea, I excel at it. I could get lost in the memories. Childhood, teenage years, young adulthood and the long journey of marriage and child rearing…all of which are in the rear view mirror now. Yikes! What a long, strange trip it’s been!

Now all these new people…little people, rough and tumble and rambunctious little boys and cute and coy and captivating little girls. Boy, how did I manage to raise ten??

As much as I long to linger in the past and remember when “Mom and Dad were still here”, I need to look forward and dive into the future positively, even eagerly, for these fun little people that the Lord has put in my life. And there may be more…LOL.

So how do I turn this around? How do I use autumn and this chronic habit of nostalgia as a fertile soil for future memories with these new little people and even with my own adult kids? How do I wrench my backward looking gaze to a future looking vision?

It’s a little scary to look forward now because those days are numbered, and I’m far enough through the tunnel to begin to see some light. And I am tempted to despair or be fearful about that…but I remember something, or Someone else. Someone who traveled with me even when I was “being knit in my mother’s womb.” Who continues to travel with me, and Who I will be with in eternity. “In my Father’s house, there are many abiding places…” John 14:2.

I think being nostalgic is safe for me. I’m safe in those memories because I lived them and survived them. If I look forward, especially now that my kids are grown and my parents are gone, there are no road markers. I’m in uncharted territory. Unmoored, untethered and unseen. But again…Isaiah writes, “I will lead the blind on a way they do not know; by paths they do not know I will guide them. I will turn darkness into light before them, and make crooked ways straight. These are my promises: I made them, I will not forsake them.”

My immediate and eternal future is safe in His hands, He will guide me. He promised! And I pray He will help me knit myself into the lives of those little people and those ones who used to be little while “I am still here.” And perhaps, I can knit some of my love of the Savior into all of their lives as well.

Teen Times, Vol. II – Fortnite

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Fortnite, or correctly spelled: Fortnight. That deliciously English word which means a unit of time of two weeks; ergo, fourteen nights. No doubt my first acquaintance with this word was in Jane Austen’s Pride & Prejudice: “I  honour your circumspection. A fortnight’s acquaintance is certainly very little. One cannot know what a man really is by the end of a fortnight.” I’d add to Jane’s observation, and wager to say that one cannot know what a man really is even by the end of a score or two.

Other English writers have toyed with this verbal antiquity.

“Depend upon it, Sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.” Dr. Johnson

And…

“I can’t see that she could have found anything nastier to say if she’d thought it out with both hands for a fortnight.” Dorothy Sayers

And even our friendly American humorist, Mark Twain, dropped an f-bomb…

“We have been housekeeping a fortnight, now long enough to have learned how to pronounce the servants’ names, but not how to spell them.  We shan’t ever learn to spell them; they were invented in Hungary and Poland, and on paper they look like the alphabet out on a drunk.” 

I think my kids feel pretty smart now that they know the meaning of this interesting word, but they didn’t stumble upon this word from reading the classics or from their vocabulary lists or even chatting with their English buddies. No….they know what the real fortnight means because of the current bane of my existence: Fortnite, the Video Game.

The first indiction of the Fentanes Video Game Experience began harmlessly with Duck Hunt, but before I could even reload, we were running the hallowed hills of Halo,  partnering with the precious Pikachu in Pokemon, dodging desperadoes in Call of Duty, meticulously making maps in Minecraft, learning harmony and happiness in Harvest Moon, seriously slugging siblings while playing Super Smash Brothers,  liberating the princess as Link in The Legend of Zelda, and the winner of them all, spending hundreds of dollars for air time for the World of Warcraft. WOW, really? Video Games 1; Mom 0. Game over, Mom, acquiesces to video game reality.

Before the second indiction began not too long ago, video game playing had subsided to a few hours of Pokemon and Harvest Moon. But, recently, a new phenomenon took over my household: Fortnite. The only good thing about Fortnite is that it doesn’t cost any money, at least not my money. That’s all.

My son and I watched Psycho last weekend. Still don’t really like that movie, but you’ve got to hand it to Janet Leigh and her ability to produce blood-curdling screams. The selfsame screams are uttered by my daughter during Fortnite. You’d think she was being stabbed in the shower. I’ve watched them play, all they are doing is running and shooting up some people every once in awhile. I leave the room and then the blood-curdling screams begin, the frantic orders to comrades to “Watch out, watch out!!!” “He’s behind you.” Followed by more blood-curdling screams. To add to this mayhem, unnamed female offspring wears a headset, which causes her to amplify her responses to the game. Hence, mother stomping into the living room at 10:30 p.m., and yelling “quit screaming” which, of course, she does not hear because of said headset. I don’t know why the expression on my face doesn’t cause her to scream.

Fortnite is the latest craze of video games. I’ve about had it. About a fortnight ago, I ran into my upstairs neighbor. I’ve been meaning to apologize for the Psycho-like screaming, and wanted to reassure them that I was not harming anyone in anyway. The neighbor kindly responded, “No, I don’t hear anything. Do you hear us when we play Fortnite?” “No…, I don’t, the insulation must be good,” I bemused. “Thanks.”

In the three decades of my child-rearing experience, I have come to appreciate video games and the entertainment they provide my children. I remember fondly the years of Halo and Super Smash Brothers because those are the years all my kids were together as well as many of their friends. Video games were one of many things they had in common with their friends, friends they still have, one who has become a family member. Now that the aforementioned unnamed female offspring has been working for about a fortnight, we’ll see if she continues to give her time to this game.

I admit I have no halo as a mom, but my call of duty is to raise kids, and part of that responsibility is to pick the battles in this battlefield, a battle royale. I am happy to report that none has yet been arrested for grand theft auto or any other felony that I know of, and though the fallout has been minimal in permitting extensive video game playing, I am grateful they don’t overwatch them. I consider my kids to be in a league of legends, and hope someday, they will triumph in the trenches of life.