Get the picture? by Sherry Hopkins

“What do you think about that?” I asked Zac after a round of zingers and quick wit between Dear Don and me. I had just informed Dear Don that I did indeed know all the answers but I just didn’t know any of the questions. Thinking that was pretty funny I turned to Zac to confirm my sharp wit.

“I wasn’t paying attention to you,” responded Zac casually from the back seat of the SUV.

He was checking his phone for text messages again.

Dear Don gives me that look likes he knows what’s coming next and he wishes he could remove himself from the situation before it unfolds.

“You weren’t paying attention to what I said?” I asked Zac, disbelieving my own ears.

”You, the child that has hung on my every word since birth, you who asked me a thousand questions a day and I answered a thousand and one? You weren’t paying attention to GRANDMA?”

“My heart is wounded; I can’t believe it, do you know what you’re saying?’ I continued in my rant.

All the while Zac sat smugly in the back still not paying attention to me.

Where did he go, this once loving, playful little boy who would sit in my lap and watch movies for hours, who stood on a stool in the kitchen to help me cook and clean?

The same little golden haired child that stared at me with those unblinking, baby blues while I sang and rocked him to sleep. Why, he used to wrap himself around my legs at the mere mention of returning home after weekends at Grandma’s and DonDon’s.

It is much much too early to have lost that little boy.

In the back seat of my car sits a ten-year-old going on fifteen. His cell phone is locked in his hand continuously. He looks in the mirror often to check “the hair.”

The pleasure I once found in tousling his hair is diminished by his constant warnings, “don’t mess with my hair.”

He cares about his clothes, his appearance, girls.

I have to say I’m not at all prepared for this transformation. I thought I had at least a year or more to adjust. But here it is and it has hit me like a freight train.

So I’m going to learn to adapt to this traumatic event. I’m going to learn to bend so I don’t break.

“So Zac,” I begin, “Do you ever think about growing up and getting married and maybe having a couple of boys and a couple of girls?”

“Gosh your Mom and I would love to have a girl. That would be fun.”

The whole time I talked he shook that head back and forth. Well, at least he isn’t as grown as I might have thought.

So I continued to tease and added, “How about two dogs, or a dog and a cat or maybe a hamster and a goldfish? Just give me something to love on please.”

So he finally looked at me very seriously with those big blue eyes and stated, “We’re having a boy and a girl!” He then went back to his phone.

I was mute, silenced by the fact that my ten-year-old grandson has a lifeplan already. “We,” he said. “We are having a boy and a girl.”

Who knew?

You get the picture.

(Contact Sherry at swhcsc@wildblue.net)