A Wrinkle in Time and Space...

There is an unusual side effect that comes from parenting a child that is wired differently.  When the waters get rough I get the almost recognizable motion sickness symptoms where it is hard to focus on anything other than the exact moment in time that I am experiencing.  Eventually, when the waters calm down though, there is a peculiar lingering sense of chaos that stays with me for days to come.  Even though the worst is over, I still find myself having difficulty focusing on the rest of my life.  The effect does wear off, and sooner or later I go back to being myself again.  Amazingly though, he's actually recovered a lot quicker than I have from our last challenging moments.  Could this be a sign of youth resilience?  If so, I would gladly accept a transfusion of his life's cocktail to rejuvenate myself.

I am glad it was Saturday night, otherwise I would of spent the entire week trying to catch up with my missed hours of sleep if it would of been Sunday.  Sometime around six in the evening one by one the clan started to infiltrate our home until at least ten or twelve teenage souls occupied every cubic inch of air in my backyard with their happy voices, and of course their music.  The oldest guy in the bunch was turning twenty three years old and they had all come to the consensus that the celebration would have to take place at my home.  Mind you when I tell you that nobody ever asked the owner, the sightly recovered parent of the child that seems to never sleep, whether it was OK to have a birthday party at my home.  Nevertheless, I never mind when they decide to hang out at my place because at least this way I have a sense of what goes on during their celebrations.  I could tell from the music selections that some other teenager's music player was being used and not my son's.  I have heard his taste of music so much that I can almost instantly tell when it is his collection of tens of thousands of songs that is being played.  Early on during the evening the music was loud, but not overly annoying so I made no attempt to get them to tone it down.  At the rate of probably every twenty minutes I would get out of my dad cage and hover over to the kitchen to take a peek out the backyard window that sits over the sink while I would clean up one or two dishes at a time.  The view was that of pure unadulterated happiness and joy which slowly but steadily fed into my own sense of relief and peace.

My bedroom also has a window that gazes out to the hot tub area in my backyard although I do not like to be poking my head through the curtains, since I feel their lives are entitled to some degree of privacy.  However, at least through the thin glass the loud but muffled sequence of events unfolded one by one as the night took its course.  "SPLASH, SPLASH, SPLASH..."  One by one I could hear each of them jumping into the pool while the rest laughed.  They dug into the storage container and pulled out every pool toy they could find.  The intense sounds of happiness of young people was contagious and kept improving my mood throughout the night.  On one of my trips to the kitchen I found every single bottle of dressings sitting on the counter.  They had cooked some veggie burgers and fed themselves.  As I went to grab the mayo jar to place it back into the fridge and avoid it from getting spoiled, the birthday boy walked into the kitchen from the sliding door and backyard, took it out of my hands and said that he would take care of it.  The next time I came into the kitchen everything had been put away.  "This is a new achievement," I thought to myself as another inch of tension faded away from my stressed out forehead.  At ten o'clock in the evening all music came to an end without me ever having to ask for them to do so.  As time carried itself to a later place I found myself amazed that they never turned the music back on again.  Soon I started to wonder if I had been in some kind of accident and the whole thing was just a dreamy part of being in a coma.

It was already midnight and by then I would typically be annoyed by so many kids still hanging out at my home and not allowing me to finally go to bed and get some rest, but their unusually "normal" behavior made up for me being tired and it never occurred to me to ask them to go back to their homes.  Suddenly my son knocked at my bedroom door and when I opened said "Dad, something is wrong with the hot tub, the water level is going down."  Originally I thought that it was just because at one moment in time I had seen eight of them in the hot tub and that since four had gotten out the water that had overflowed into the pool via a small waterfall had not been replaced yet.  It was the funniest thing to watch as I went to inspect the situation the remaining four hot tub occupants where all sitting in bottom center of the jacuzzi like fish hoping to survive a drought.  When I went to check the valves, somebody had turned one to the position that takes the water out of the jacuzzi for servicing purposes.  When I turned the valve back to its correct position, huge jets of water shot from all four directions on to the remaining occupants in the hot tub.  They all laughed so hard as it was obvious that not only did the streams catch them by surprise, but it was powerful enough to almost hurt.  Not one of them got out!  I just had to laugh at their amazing resolution to remain put while the tub filled itself back up again.  They all blamed the valve changes on the birthday boy, probably because it is true that he is typically the one that does things like that, but also because they knew that I would not be upset with the guest of honor.

At one o'clock in the morning I was walking out of my room to give a couple of instructions for the young people to start making their way back to their homes when I realized that the only one left was my son.  What amazed me was that he was coming in from the backyard and the first words out of his mouth were, "Everyone's gone and I cleaned up the mess outside."  Now this my dear friends is a first.  The fact that my son found it necessary to clean up after himself and his friends was an incredible shock that not only amazed me, but left me wondering what part of that day's experience flipped the switch in his mind to do so in the first place.  I don't have an answer, and frankly I am not sure I will ever get one so I'll blame it all to a wrinkle in time and space.  He's back to his messy self, so trust me when I tell you that this was not a life changing experience.  However, when God gives me a break, I just take it!

Dad