The Other Side of Someday: Eighteen Years Later, My Son Is a Person. Now What?

By Kevin Redman

When they're growing up, everything is about "someday," the sports they play, the interests they'll develop. Parents are all about getting them ready for someday. Then they grow up, graduate, and move on, and ... then what? This book touches on the joy and heartbreak of getting for someday, then all of a sudden seeing it in the rearview mirror.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Jul 6, 2021
• ISBN: 9781663225719

Kevin Redman

Kevin Redman worked as a local sports writer in Massachusetts for 12 years, winning numerous journalism awards from the New England Press Association, before becoming an English teacher at Tyngsborough (Mass.) High School, where he has worked since 1999. He learned to ski at age 44, has hiked extensively throughout Northern New England, and gets up at 4 a.m. every school day to run his 5K loop. He has degrees from Boston University and the University of Massachusetts-Lowell. Kevin lives in Massachusetts with his wife, his son, and his dog, Yoda. His first book, Father Along, was published in 2013.

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Copyright © 2021 Kevin Redman.

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ISBN: 978-1-6632-2570-2 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-6632-2571-9 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2021913491

iUniverse rev. date:   07/01/2021

To Rose, to my parents,

to my brothers and sisters,

but especially to John.

Contents

Preface

The End of the Beginning

So It’s Cancerous, But …

Let’s Go, Dad!

Yoda

He’ll Look Back on This Forever

Not One Step Backward

I Told You So

Unmoored

There Won’t Be Time, There Won’t Be Time …

Time for an Awkward Conversation

Rose

Dad

Mom

Chris

I Thought This Would Be the Last … …

But Coronavirus Demanded a Chapter

Preface

Doesn’t every parent come home for the first time with their first child and think, How could they send me home with this infant? I don’t know what the hell I’m doing!

Most of the time, parents figure it out. You know what’s even weirder? When the heavy lifting’s over and they’re out of the house.

Now what do I do?

When I published my first book, FatherLoad, in 2013, my son was twelve years old, and I was in the thick of parenting. I coached John’s soccer teams, fall and spring, for nine years. I volunteered with Cub Scouts, then Boy Scouts as he rose through the ranks. As a teacher with summers off, we got to explore: pick a nearby town and find a playground. Later, we’d head to New Hampshire to hike the state parks. We tracked down amusement parks, relentlessly. We went to a lot of Lowell Spinners Minor League Baseball games.

And the wonderful, never-ending job of parenting was all pointed ahead to that elusive, optimistic someday. Someday he’d play varsity soccer. Someday he might be an Eagle Scout. Someday he’d go off to college.

But parenting, it turns out, isn’t never-ending. At some point, the son becomes himself. Clearly the worrying continues forever—get home safely, make good choices, yes, I’ll reload your dining dollars—but the day in, day out, hands-on parenting has to end. Otherwise, you’ve got a pathetic couch potato mooching off of you forever.

So here’s this book, reflecting on the choices we made, the son we raised, and the realization that eighteen years passed for everyone while my son was growing up. My own parents changed. My siblings changed. I changed.

Along the way, I learned what a two-way street parenting is, how much I got from my son while I was trying to bring a decent human being into an often-indecent world. From looking ahead all the time to realizing, Oh. This is someday. He’s here, as we moved him into a college dorm over a thousand miles away. My wife and I faced fourteen weeks until he’d come back for Thanksgiving. We faced a tidy bedroom without him and a life no longer built around his schedule, his soccer games, his Scouting activities.

There was a lot to process, and it’s in the pages that follow—reflections from different angles and from different experiences along the way. Like life, this book is not really a straight-line narrative but thoughts from different times and different angles, about being a dad and how that job changes.

How did it go?

Read on.

The End of the Beginning

When we first came home from Ukraine with our four-month-old son, John, I spent part of that summer converting my daily journal entries from the three-week trip into a more cohesive story, something to share with the family, and especially him, later on. It ran for about sixty pages, and it closed with The Beginning. He was six months old when I finished it, and life was all about someday. Someday he’d walk. Someday he’d have his group of friends. Someday he’d be playing high school soccer or working toward becoming an Eagle Scout. Someday he’d find an activity, a talent to latch onto and develop. Someday he’d go to college and start a career. Someday he’d define himself and shape his life.

It’s eighteen years later, a Friday night in June. He is on the football field outside of the high school. Graduation ceremonies for the class of 2019 just ended inside the gym, and 120 of them marched out, headed for the football field. The school tradition is for an outdoor gathering that brings the graduates together with families, teachers, and recent graduates. The stadium lights are on, and the seniors, with a few minutes’ head start on everyone else, are recongregating at midfield, a mass of red robes under a beautiful spring sky. I am not close enough to hear what anyone is saying, but they are clearly getting themselves together one last time. As parents and families and teachers approach the field, the graduates heave their mortarboards skyward as one and cheer as the sky fills with this flock of slashing, zigging squares.

I like that metaphor, actually: mortarboards and graduates, both traveling fast, in unpredictable directions … nobody knows where they’re headed. Some will go higher and further than others. Some will take sudden turns. Others will land abruptly and be stepped on. But for one, two, three seconds or more, they are all aloft, all on an upward flight. Those kids are overjoyed and optimistic, as they had best be, because if they aren’t feeling that way tonight, with everything ahead of them, will they ever?

This is the end of high school—the other side of someday. Of course there is still so much for him to do, but he is the driver now. Parenting becomes so different; we are no longer the decision makers, wish as we might to deny that. If this is going to work, meaning life, John has to call his own shots and live with, through, and beyond the results. The somedays are all his now. I’m not coaching him in soccer, volunteering with the scout troop, riding with him as he drives with his learner’s permit. It is, partly, a sad time. Fortunately, though, the three of us have enjoyed a charmed life since we first met in that Ukrainian orphanage in June 2001.

In four years of high school, he launched model rockets and built trebuchets. He took six math courses. He worked his butt off for soccer, his passion, clearing snow from a massive rectangle in the backyard each winter so he could dribble and shoot. He set his heart on making varsity as a sophomore. He didn’t, and he dealt with it. He found out he was good at track, really good. He graduated as a two-sport All-Star. He learned robotics. He was an Eagle Scout, adding the rare Silver Palm for earning fifteen additional merit badges after the twenty-one that got him to Eagle. He was an altar server, and he was—is—a fantastic big cousin to a flock of great kids who are about half his height.

He found the best people to be friends with. I could be up in the booth on the PA system, announcing a night game at school, and I’d look into the bleachers to see my son in the midst of a sea of great kids: my students, his friends. He’d ski with them, go to Five Guys with them, have a bunch of them over to our basement for FIFA tournaments on Xbox.

He decided on aerospace engineering, and the college visits began, the summer before his senior year. He lived through the application process and all of the acceptance, rejection, and deferments that come with it. He chose Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, 1,255 miles away in Daytona Beach, Florida. Rose and I were losing our boy. But we’d been losing him for a while by then.

That thought had dawned on me years earlier. We were fortunate enough to be able to take trips all over the country. By the time he started high school, John had been to more than thirty-five states. He had seen how different subways operate in different cities. He’d ridden in cabs, buses, and water taxis. He’d seen museums and gone up to the top of skyscrapers. He was interested in the world, not afraid of it. It was important to us that he seek out and embrace the world, not hide from it. And I knew, long ago, that we were raising our son to be capable of leaving us, of living without needing us.

So there we were, the three of us and his four grandparents, saying goodbye to Tyngsborough High School. We’d have him with us all summer, and off he’d go.

How did we ever get here? It was not a straight line; that’s for sure.

So It’s Cancerous, But …

It is the middle of the winter during John’s junior year of high school. His graduation is eighteen months away, but that’s not the thought on this day. I’ve just had radiation treatment number twenty-five out of thirty, and this scorched-ass campaign is finally winding down. Tomorrow they’ll take new X-rays, and the last three days of zapping will key in on a very specific area. Whether that will make the third-degree nuclear burns on my backside better or worse, I don’t know. But there’s just a week to go. At Tuesday’s weekly visit with the doctor, they asked how the pain was. In comparison, nine months ago, in April, in simpler times, my appendix was on the verge of bursting during a family trip to Williamsburg, Virginia. I suffered through an excruciating sleepless night, and the next morning in the emergency room, I told the doctors that the pain was a solid seven. Through the weekend, this current agony was a fire-breathing nine point six. I did get some painkillers, but when something that begins with oxy isn’t enough to knock back that pain, it’s just time to bear down, ride it out, and count the days until the treatment is over and the pain recedes.

It had gone on for six weeks. Six weeks with a chemotherapy pump attached to my hip, sending its helpful poison through the port-a-cath installed just under the skin at my collarbone. Get hooked up on Monday, then teach, cook, sleep, run, and shower for five days, working with and around that pump. Then come back to the Dana-Farber center just down the road from our house after school on Friday to disconnect. Radiation every afternoon after school.

By the second week? Relentless itching just inside my ass. Weeks three and four? Itching gone, replaced by what feels like an open, raw nerve, sending electrified burning sensations any time there’s a bowel movement or toilet paper contact. The radiologist said that spot would keep getting exquisitely sensitive for the rest of the treatments. So the pain was just getting started.

My case is hardly the worst in the dreadful annals of cancer. A routine colonoscopy spotted it—one stupid polyp. The biopsy showed it to be stage 2 out of 4, and there was one wild card, a single little lymph node flaring up nearby. Was it simply waving and saying everything was OK? Was it a little aggravated due to all the recent scope-related activity in the neighborhood? Or was it up and running, sending cancerous ill fortune to the far reaches of my body? That was the big question.

So, it is cancerous, my doctor had said over the phone, almost three months earlier. That was the first week of November 2017. I stood outside as a light rain began to fall, coming off the field after my son’s high school soccer team just missed staging a stunning upset in the state tournament. John scored in the first half, and the whole team played brilliantly. Then they collapsed in the second half and lost two to one to the region’s third seed. I thought that was bad, watching my son and my students trudge off the field, crushed, the seniors tearing up as their careers ended.