Sick and Tried

I know what you're thinking. "My goodness, will they just let any inarticulate, non-speller blog now? Is that what we've come to?" But no, I meant TRIED, not tired. I have been sick and I have been tried.

By sick, I mean SICK! Physically ill. The sickest I can remember being in years. The first time ever I've missed 6 days of work because of illness. That includes the birth of my children, no lie. Sick, sick, sick!

By tried, I mean my patience. Every day. By a mere boy, no less. A boy who is thoroughly, if naively, convinced he is a man. And at 13, he does unfortunately, look like a man and when his voice isn’t cracking, he even sounds like a man. And yet, he is so far from manhood he can't even see it through the swirling fog of hormonal angst, across the abyss-mal crevasse of adolescence, with its roiling river of molten anxiety raging far below, over and around the boulders of school, peer pressure and puberty; any one of which he might be painfully thrown against at any moment.

Now, his daddy and I are on the far side of the chasm, and we are supposed to be building the bridge this boy will strut across into the easy and carefree days of adulthood, (I don’t have the heart to tell him it only gets H-A-R-D-E-R!). But try as we might, we are clearly screwing it up magnificently. We are as blinded by the fog, abyss and smoking river of fear as he.

I know we are not the first parents and child to stand teetering on opposite sides of the canyon, shouting unintelligibly at each other. But we may as well be. Everyone who makes the journey has to build their own bridge. For a while, I thought the bridge my folks built, the one that carried me safely to adulthood, would still be passable. But alas, a troll has taken up residence there and we can’t answer his riddle. So each day we take our ineffectual tools and begin again to bang randomly on things in an attempt to create a conduit from where he is, to where we hope he will someday be. We do this while he yells loudly and quite confidently from the other side that he is already standing beside us.

Yes, my patience is well and truly TRIED!