The edge of seventeen

Greetings blog readers. It's been a hot minute

Welp, they turned seventeen years old today. So I thought I might dust off the old blog and memorialize this by looking back and looking forward. 

By way of update, two years ago we moved to Northern California from our home in Dallas. We get asked all the time about why we did this, but the simplest answer possible is that we wanted to do it. So we did it. There's layers and layers wrapped into that, but there's no reason to broadcast that here. It is lovely here, California is breathtaking in every way you could imagine. The kids are thriving here and growing into remarkable adult beings.

I stopped writing new material for this blog because the children were getting old enough that it felt invasive of their privacy to have their dad write about their lives to strangers. Today is an exception. They turned seventeen today, which sent me looking through photographs and videos of them as babies. It was an emotional journey. Seventeen sounds like a lifetime ago, but it also feels like it was just yesterday. The mundane memories of life with infant twins has washed away, protected by the parental reptilian brain that removes all recall of sleepless nights and vomit so you might be encouraged to reproduce again. 

It's this parental amnesia that makes me thankful that I was encouraged by so many to write down our experiences when they were younger. 

The wife and I are reminded that our time with them in the house is finite. They will not be here with us for much longer. The college evaluation process began months ago, and the reality is that within the next 18 months, they will both be living on their own somewhere else. This is the part of being a twin parent that nobody tells you about. You get told about buying two strollers and how to get them both to sleep and how to manage feedings, but once you get your twins to the age where they care for themselves, everyone presumes you've just "got it". I'm not sure that we do. Neither of us really even recall what it's like back in the "before times" when we had all the freedom in the world to do as we wished. It is a scary horizon, but watching them go off to school and figure out their lives will also be rewarding, I'm sure (or I hope). I find myself being jealous of parents who popped kids out one at a time, because they get to break in the college flight from home process and get used to the emotions for the next kid. 

I have questions about how they'll care for themselves. I feel like I still have to remind them to brush their teeth or wear matching socks. Or wear socks at all. But I was a total wreck of a human being until I was about 43 years old so I'm sure they'll figure it out. 

By way of update into their lives, both kids discovered musical theater (or theatre if you're being that way). They've fallen in with a remarkably creative group of friends and continue to amaze both of us with their growing dedication to the arts. Singing and dancing was not on my list of things I expected from either of them, but here we are. 

In that vein, our daughter always wrote creative stories. She wrote her first book (unpublished, barely read) when she was in 8th grade. She's in a creative writing program at her high school now and pops out some amazing work. I wanted to leave this entry with one of those stories. 

She and I were at a flea market in Petaluma. She spots a bucket of old keys marked "11 pounds, old keys". And she asks me for it. It was 25 bucks. I was like "I'm not paying 25 bucks for 11 pounds of old keys." Nevertheless, she persisted. She took on this vocal affect and ran the words together to be "elevenpoundsofoldkeys" but said like an old man saying a singular word. Then it somehow became "llllevenpoudzaholdkeyz". Whatever, we negotiated the bucket of keys down to 20 bucks and drove off with a shitload of keys to nothing. 

On the drive back home, I commented to her that each of those keys once did something. They once had a purpose and a meaning before they ended up in a bucket at a flea market for some weird artsty kid to buy. That was it. That was the extent of the conversation. 

Six weeks later, she turned this out, and I think it's the best way to close out this entry. It's one of my favorites of her work. Thanks for checking in with us, if you're new here take a walk back through the ridiculous history of raising these twins. I'll update this again in a few more years. 

11 lbs. Old Keys

By LB

This one is red and unlocked a record cabinet,

for the woman with sticky-handed toddlers:

A girl with a smattering of freckles,

and a boy with thin blonde hair, who always seemed to be missing a tooth.

The records were a gift from woman’s mom,

who died a year before the twins were born.

This tiny key opened a diary

that a little girl vowed to write in every night.

She got caught up in elementary school and her chickens,

but sometimes she would come back to it,

to reread the blocked letters

that insist her best friend is a girl named Annabelle

This one was made for a safe, broken, and never used again.

This rusted one opened a family’s first house,

where they had their first kid,

where they lost their first kid,

and was discarded at the doorway

when they moved away next year.

This one unlocked a classroom door.

This one has a blue head, and opened his locker.

It was often fumbled in sweaty hands, straight out of soccer practice.

Once, it was pinned between his fingers and another’s,

as he broke every rule his parents ever made

for their straight son.

This one unlocked a closet.

This one unlocks an old lady's home.

The first and last place she lived. She was raised in the hills.

A girl with the sheep.

She died in the hills.

A woman – with a wolf of a husband.

I have counted 553 keys in this jar.

Passed from hand to hand, life to life,

An explicit history in every flick of dust and long-gone ridge of a fingerprint,

And now to me, who has only managed to tell you

about 8 of them.