{"id":4315,"date":"2015-09-20T21:04:32","date_gmt":"2015-09-21T02:04:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/rebeccafrech\/?p=4315"},"modified":"2015-09-20T21:06:54","modified_gmt":"2015-09-21T02:06:54","slug":"my-son-and-the-pope","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/rebeccafrech\/2015\/09\/my-son-and-the-pope.html","title":{"rendered":"My Son and The Pope"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

\"\"<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Pope is coming to America,\u201d my son said softly. \u201cAre we going to see him?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cNo,\u201d I told him, \u201cwe\u2019re not.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cOh. We should have.\u201d And he walked away.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\"\" He\u2019s a funny kid, hard to know in a lot of ways. He\u2019s mostly silent, always thinking. He rarely shares what\u2019s on his mind, or the things he\u2019s mulling over for hours and days at a time. He\u2019s 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\u2019t 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\u2019m here if he needs me. Which is why his desire to see the Pope took me completely by surprise. He\u2019d never once breathed a word of interest in traveling to Philadelphia this week.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere are large crowds all around him,\u201d I pointed out. \u201cThere would be nowhere to be alone. Would you have been okay with that?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cNo, but yes. No because I would need lots of silence afterwards, but \u00a0yes because those are our people and he is Our Pope.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

*I think perhaps we need to plan a trip to Rome. Vatican City\u00a0is our native land, they are our people, and he is Our Pope.<\/p>\n

Photo Credits:<\/p>\n

Pope Francis\u00a0presidencia.gov.ar [CC BY-SA 2.0 (http:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by-sa\/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons<\/p>\n

My son\u2019s photo was taken by me and all rights to it are reserved.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cThe Pope is coming to America,\u201d my son said softly. \u201cAre we going to see him?\u201d \u201cNo,\u201d I told him, \u201cwe\u2019re not.\u201d \u201cOh. We should have.\u201d 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1979,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4315","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nMy Son and The Pope<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\""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." 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