Home for the Weekend

• Raise your hand if you have a kid. Now raise your other hand if it’s a teenager. Take a look in a mirror.. both hands above your head in the universal sign of surrender. And I’m right there with you… mine is 15… and a boy. Six feet one inch of pure hormones… and apparently starving hormones because he never stops eating. 
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• Don’t get me wrong. I love my son more than anything… would gladly lay down my life for him or even take someone else’s if they were going to do him harm. The day he was born changed my life forever. Of course so did the day I started shaving my legs… but this is a little better.
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•  Most of the time anyway. Sam usually stays with his grandparents on the weekends. Oh.. I named him Sam after the hottie Scott Bakula’s character Dr. Samuel Beckett from the 80s sci fi show Quantum Leap. 
• Don’t know if you ever caught an episode but the show was amazing. The basic premise was this genius scientist Beckett invented a machine that could transport you through time but some bugs existed. When Dr. Beckett arrived in a different time he possessed the body of some poor soul from that time who had a problem which Beckett was supposed to solve before he could “leap” out and hopefully back to his own time. He leapt into air force pilots in the 60’s… vampire wannabees in some time… a civil war vet… a pregnant woman… a boy with downs syndrome and even his own best friend. He never actually made it home. Stupid producers cut the series and I guess that was the writers’ way of getting revenge. Really sucked. I cried for the whole weekend I wrote nasty letters to NBC. In any event, being that the character could literally be any one at any time, Beckett needed to be an all around kind of guy. He could sing and play piano… he was as I said before the genius mensa types aspire to be… he was gorgeous… and yet he was sensitive and humble… and every woman he met fell in love with him. *sighs* I was no exception. So when I found out I was going to have a precious little boy of my very own… I thought of all the traits I’d like for him to possess. And then I named him after the perfect man so he would indeed inherit them. Made sense at the time. What can I say… my hormones were out of whack.. I was preggers… sue me. 

  
  

  This weekend Sam (mine.. not the time traveling genius from stage and screen) went with my sister to a Relay for Life event on Friday night. He gave up his night to don a viking’s costume and walk around a football field track sweating his brains out, being hugged by girls, and tackled by guys all in an effort to raise money for cancer research. He’s a good kid. And he found out that literally staying up for 30 hours isn’t as much fun as one is led to believe. When he got home Saturday he went to sleep. No surprise there. I woke him around 4pm just so he could try and get into a regular sleep schedule for the rest of the weekend. And my son was more or less a zombie in a recliner. He barely moved.. his eyes were glassy.. and to let you know the height of his exhaustion I can only say that his phone stayed in another room… in the off position. I wasn’t sure he was going to survive the event in which he had striven to help so many. But youth is resilient. I had to go out around 7 and on the way back I stopped at Zaxby’s and picked him up some dinner. Walked into the back door to smell pizza… my pizza… Lean Cuisine Margarita pizza box sitting empty on the counter… thank you son. He was back in his recliner and seemed much more bright eyed with a slice of my fave going into his mouth. I handed him the jumbo sized Zaxby’s Zesty Burger meal… he mumbled thanks between swallows.. and left with the assurance my boy had returned to life. 
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• The weekend is different when the boy is here. He sleeps even later than I do… so my mornings are quiet. I can tell when he wakes because strange sounds begin to issue forth from his living room. This morning I heard a crackling sound that repeated every few seconds… a new sound… so it caught my attention. “What you doin, son?” I queried down the hall. “Burning down trees.” He replied. Ah. Silly mom. I should have known. Later I’ll hear the voices from CSI, gun shots from some video shoot em all and let God sort em out game, and his own deep tones as he chats and laughs with whoever his newest girlfriend happens to be this week. He’ll come out to tell me personally about the coolest new app he’s found for his iPhone and stand chuckling as he watches me attempt to play it. Poor mom. How can she possibly survive without his assistance. How indeed. On a much more personal note… other things are a bit different with the boy’s weekend presence as well. Actually other things are just absent when he is here.
   
• No apologies.. mom is a full grown woman with needs… and I don’t mean margarita pizza. The Hitachi magic wand which tends to sit in his special place from Friday night til Sunday.. readily available.. easily accessible… is confined to his dark, lonely drawer when teenaged ears are apt to hear the buzz… and subsequent happy sounds. There are some things a boy just doesn’t need to know about his mom. And that’s one of them. It’s Sunday afternoon. He’s been up an hour and eaten twice already. After I make dinner and probably before the dishes are even done he’ll eat again. I don’t say anything. He cooks for himself during non meal times. He doesn’t clean.. but he cooks. I even try not to mentally add the grocery cost of each new plate he totes down the hall. What’s the point. He’s hungry. He’s going to eat. Heck.. I’m just happy when he leaves me a few things for personal nourishment during the coming week.

  
  

  In the morning I’ll sweep through his two rooms at 5:30 before he wakes and pick up all the Gatorade bottles, soda cans, plastic wrappers, and paper plates so he can begin fresh when he gets home from school. I’ll try to gently wake his very large.. very manlike sleeping form…. And I’ll realize that I love him more every day of his life. And then I’ll hope to goodness he decides to visit my parents this coming weekend. Bad mommy. Very bad mommy. ****** okay.. had to add this… before I could even post this blog I went to put a load of clothes into the wash.. walking past the kitchen I noticed an open yellow bag on the counter and the aroma of garlic… “Sam!,” I call through the house, “is this empty?” He lumbers in and looks at the bag. A sheepish look, “oh..no.”  I walk on to the laundry room as I hear him tying up the rest of the quickly thawing Tostitos pizza rolls to place them back in the freezer. Not adding the money in my head.. really.