Notes From the Red Couch: 'Twas the Day Before The Night Before Christmas

It's not yet 7:00AM and I'm sitting on my red couch with tissue box at one elbow and cup of tea at the other. The sun is not yet up, but the light over the front stoop is on, illuminating the thick, sparkling, brilliantly white snow blanketing the shrubs outside my window. I've decided it's time to hire someone to plow the driveway; I don't think I could get out this morning if I wanted to. And I don't want to.

Despite my home remedies of organic yogurt chocked-full of five active live cultures, garlic, vitamin C and tea, I'm sick. Not hold-the-stomach and sit-for-hours-on-the-toilet-with-a-bucket-under-my-chin sick, but lumps-the-size-of-grapes-under-my-ears with sore-throat-and-phlegmy-cough-runny-nose-and-low-grade-misery sick. I almost prefer the first kind; it is a righteous sick, one leaving no doubt about one's ability to perform. Unfortunately, I rarely get sick like that and so live my current sickness with a niggling sense of guilt, feeling like I could do this or that if I really tried. And I'm not going to try. That was decided when I woke up, realizing that this cold had progressed instead of retreated--even after a good night's sleep--then measured the new-fallen snow. Four new inches of snow on my front yard, on my sidewalk, on my driveway. Sheesh. If Toby, my son, were here, I'd make him get outside and get busy. But he isn't.

Toby moved away from home two months after his 18th birthday, bunking with a rotating group of friends in a drafty house in Eau Claire. I didn't approve, didn't think he was “making good choices,” and in many ways he isn't. His leaving made me nervous, sad and grumpy as I personalized his decision, secretly feeling it reflected on my ability to parent, hurt because he wanted to leave me.

Since classes ended I've been gulping down fiction the same way an alcoholic might chug a bottle of vodka after a period of abstinence. The day before my son had his “parents open house” I'd finished a book about two 58 year old men who—in a last-ditch effort to reclaim their youth—meet to climb a mountain they'd conquered in their youth. They reminisce about those early days, how they stayed up all night debating god and philosophy, sleeping on the sand, traveling up and down the coast unfettered by thoughts of bills, family and where their next meal will come from.

Reading this, I realized something: when I was Toby's age I'd thumbed across the country twice; was solidly ensconced in the drug culture with my addictions already ruling my choices; and had engaged in all manner of unsafe, life-threatening behaviors. In other words, I'd made terrible choices. And I decided that Toby is doing exactly what he's supposed to do. While today's choices may dictate that he work a little harder in the future, they are not nearly as stupid and harmful as the choices I made when I was his age. And he's still not drinking or smoking pot.

Given his gene pool—one of both genius-level IQ and abject addiction—I think Toby's doing just fine.

Now, if the dude would only come shovel my driveway I could get my mail out and take a nap.