Stages in the Wilderness

I'm on my second nine year old. I was really appalled, a few years ago, to wake up and find out that no matter what Elphine did, the poor child was constantly standing around on my last nerve. If she blinked it was in an irritating way. If she shuffled across the floor it was with an air of disrespect. When she tried to talk to anyone, it was in an out of sorts way like she had turned into a stranger and an alien. I found that I was constantly upset and began to worry that I had made some terrible errors as her mother and that the two of us would never get along again. But then, most strangely, she turned eleven and morphed again into something cheerful and pleasant and reasonable and more comfortable in her own skin. Only then did the lightbulb go on and I thought “Oh! Eight, nine and ten must be like three and four! It must have been a stage!”

So the last few weeks as Alouicious, who is very very nine, has become more and more cloudy and gangly and difficult, blaming me for the badness of his life and the failings of reality, I have not suffered very much existential woe. “He is nine”, I say to myself every few minutes, “this too will pass.”

It's one of the great difficulties of parenting, or mothering, or being human really. The moment you get comfortable with who someone is, they shift and change. The baby you give birth to undergoes such constant revolutions that you are really standing on quick sand. And as they grow, it may be slightly less obvious, but there is nothing fixed about the child, neither physically nor spiritually. And then you are changing. Though maybe more slowly. And the person you have married is by no means the same as the day you met or married him. So in your family unit you gain a sort of comfortableness, like we all know each other, but various members take turns not fitting in the way they did before at any given moment. You think you have someone figured out and then they grow and ruin it.

Well, except that if they didn't you would go mad. They need to grow and change. You probably need to grow and change. If you are always stuck in one particular trouble or other, never coming out of it to go be in some other trouble, you would not want to keep trying. I am finally out of Numbers and into Deuteronomy (so maybe there's hope that February will actually end) and discovered again that after the people refused to go into the Land, believing that God hated them for showing them something so good without, obviously, intending to give it to them, because, you know, he brought them out of Egypt, but the people of Palestine were going to be too much for him, so he, God, must have been just taunting them, Israel…where was I? Oh yes, they were in the wilderness 39 years from that moment. Talk about a stage. They went from stage to stage, from the Red Sea to Mount Hor to Siani and so on and so forth and up to edge of the Promised Land, stage by stage, but then once they rejected God's Promise, the next stage was Thirty Nine Years. What an enormous drag for Moses, as he reminded them over and over.

And yet, they did come out of it. Well, they died, but as a people they came out of it. Things do change. Sometimes they even get better. Sometimes children grow into pleasantness again. Sometimes the family functions in comfort and joy, stage by long agonizing stage. I suppose the key is not to constantly fret, something I am terrible at. None of my stages have yet lasted thirty nine years, but if they did, it would all turn out ok.