![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Gasping for Air
Jan. 8th, 2007 10:06 pmAfter my son's ex-girlfriend moved out, and we decided to pursue custody of our grandson, we began fixing one of the upstairs bedrooms so he'd have a room of his own. One evening, when my wife wasn't working, we browsed the aisles of BJ's and K-Mart looking for simple furnishings to make what had been my teenage son's room into a child's room again. It was one of the few things we'd done together in recent years and it reminded me of the times we'd done those things for our own kids.
I don't remember everything we got, but there was a Sponge Bob table lamp for the dresser and a little red, yellow, and green traffic signal for a night light. We also found an inexpensive blue and beige carpet to cover the hardwood floor and the following day I retrieved from the attic, and refinished, some of the childrens' furniture that I'd built years before.
After that, my son and I went to the mall to buy fall and winter clothes for the little boy. We'd just paid the attorney's retainer, so the money was tight. But near the sale racks at Old Navy, the little boy spotted a display of fuzzy, brown teddy bears. To keep him occupied while his dad browsed the clothing racks, I let him pick one up and then realized that he needed this as much as warm socks and a winter coat. From that day on, Bobby Bear was always tucked in with the little boy at bedtime and for afternoon naps.
Later on, after shared custody had been arranged with the little boy's mom, I made sure that Bobby Bear was always in his accustomed place when my grandson returned home. When there's been such sweeping and traumatic change in a child's life, it seems important to help them find tangible, emotional anchors in its aftermath. Along with a room that was now his own, I think Bobby Bear became one of those as well.
After my son and his little boy had moved out, the back bedroom became a haven for all the things, seen and unseen, that are sometimes left behind when a child leaves the place where he's lived the first few years of his life. In the months that followed, I only ventured there a couple of times.
Each time, it took only a moment or two in the cold and quiet room to leave me, quite literally, gasping for air. Each time, I stumbled down the stairs in a panic to reach the open air outside the house. And I knew for a certainty that I could never be the one to finally put away all that our hands and hearts had put there for him.
Still, having been so close to him, in those precious and vulnerable years when childhood so innocently reveals each nuance of the developing character and personality, I knew that if it was hard for me it must be doubly so for him. So I tried very hard not to interfere with his and his father's adjustment to their new life.
It was a necessity that I understood because of what my father had told me of his homecoming after the war, of what he'd gone through to simply gain a share of emotional custody from my maternal grandmother, with whom I'd already shared a deep and abiding attachment.
Now, having long puzzled over how such a wrenching conflict could've grown between two people of such importance to me, it occured to me how easily I might've become, in my own family, the very thing that my father had found himself pitted against. But, for the first time as well, I think I truly understood the love of a long-departed grandparent, the desperation and heartbreak of the letting go.
LPK
LiveJournal
1.8.2007
I don't remember everything we got, but there was a Sponge Bob table lamp for the dresser and a little red, yellow, and green traffic signal for a night light. We also found an inexpensive blue and beige carpet to cover the hardwood floor and the following day I retrieved from the attic, and refinished, some of the childrens' furniture that I'd built years before.
After that, my son and I went to the mall to buy fall and winter clothes for the little boy. We'd just paid the attorney's retainer, so the money was tight. But near the sale racks at Old Navy, the little boy spotted a display of fuzzy, brown teddy bears. To keep him occupied while his dad browsed the clothing racks, I let him pick one up and then realized that he needed this as much as warm socks and a winter coat. From that day on, Bobby Bear was always tucked in with the little boy at bedtime and for afternoon naps.
Later on, after shared custody had been arranged with the little boy's mom, I made sure that Bobby Bear was always in his accustomed place when my grandson returned home. When there's been such sweeping and traumatic change in a child's life, it seems important to help them find tangible, emotional anchors in its aftermath. Along with a room that was now his own, I think Bobby Bear became one of those as well.
After my son and his little boy had moved out, the back bedroom became a haven for all the things, seen and unseen, that are sometimes left behind when a child leaves the place where he's lived the first few years of his life. In the months that followed, I only ventured there a couple of times.
Each time, it took only a moment or two in the cold and quiet room to leave me, quite literally, gasping for air. Each time, I stumbled down the stairs in a panic to reach the open air outside the house. And I knew for a certainty that I could never be the one to finally put away all that our hands and hearts had put there for him.
Still, having been so close to him, in those precious and vulnerable years when childhood so innocently reveals each nuance of the developing character and personality, I knew that if it was hard for me it must be doubly so for him. So I tried very hard not to interfere with his and his father's adjustment to their new life.
It was a necessity that I understood because of what my father had told me of his homecoming after the war, of what he'd gone through to simply gain a share of emotional custody from my maternal grandmother, with whom I'd already shared a deep and abiding attachment.
Now, having long puzzled over how such a wrenching conflict could've grown between two people of such importance to me, it occured to me how easily I might've become, in my own family, the very thing that my father had found himself pitted against. But, for the first time as well, I think I truly understood the love of a long-departed grandparent, the desperation and heartbreak of the letting go.
LPK
LiveJournal
1.8.2007
