My Son and The Pope

“The Pope is coming to America,” my son said softly. “Are we going to see him?”

“No,” I told him, “we’re not.”

“Oh. We should have.” And he walked away.

Later this afternoon, I found him curled up on the couch, intently watching his laptop screen. Instead of a movie, he was watching the Papal audience in Cuba.

He’s a funny kid, hard to know in a lot of ways. He’s mostly silent, always thinking. He rarely shares what’s on his mind, or the things he’s mulling over for hours and days at a time. He’s lived his whole lifetime in my house, and yet I doubt that any of us really know him, except his younger sister. I know that he yearns for solitude and simplicity. He mentions his desire to own a tiny house (399 sq ft or smaller so that he doesn’t have to pay taxes on it) and prefers clunky old cars to anything shiny and new. He runs and plays, laughs and teases the youngest children; but his inmost thoughts remain secret. I struggle often with being his mother, an extreme extrovert parenting an extreme introvert, so I mostly just give him space and make sure that he knows I’m here if he needs me. Which is why his desire to see the Pope took me completely by surprise. He’d never once breathed a word of interest in traveling to Philadelphia this week.

“There are large crowds all around him,” I pointed out. “There would be nowhere to be alone. Would you have been okay with that?”

“No, but yes. No because I would need lots of silence afterwards, but  yes because those are our people and he is Our Pope.”

*I think perhaps we need to plan a trip to Rome. Vatican City is our native land, they are our people, and he is Our Pope.

Photo Credits:

Pope Francis presidencia.gov.ar [CC BY-SA 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

My son’s photo was taken by me and all rights to it are reserved.