The Upper Limit

How did we get here so fast?

The final year of elementary school has been ripe with growth opportunities for my oldest son, Pascal, including the chance for a role in the school play.  

During the Christmas play auditions, he told me he requested to have a part with only one line. “I want to participate, Mom, but I don’t want to have any sort of main part.” 

“I totally get it,” I told him. And I did. He had never been one to crave the spotlight of the stage. At four and five years old, I prayed over him for bravery and gave him many pep talks to get him to stand on stage with his classmates. Ever the animated child in normal life, the countless eyes of the audience caused him to freeze in terror.  

I was shocked when, after school on the day of the dress rehearsal, the play set to debut in four hours, he ran up to me and said, “I’m now the lead boy in the play.”

***

I walked the familiar aisle to the children’s medicine section and grabbed the same store brand chewable acetaminophen box I always get. Pascal had a cold, and I wanted to be prepared if he spiked a fever. As I walked away, I held up the box to confirm it was the grape flavor, and my eyes landed on the bold type at the top: Children Ages 2-11. 

Eleven.

Eleven.

Eleven.

I stopped walking, and all other motion in the store paused. It felt like a movie. The camera panned and landed on me, frozen, and holding the box suspended in the air. Everything around me was blurred and unmoving. It was only me and the medicine. Me and the age range. Me and the realization that the definition of a child, according to this medicine, is age 2-11.

A single thought formed in my mind—we’ve reached the upper limit.

The camera panned out and the aisles around me came alive with shoppers pushing carts and talking to one another. Someone squeezed by me to get to the item they wanted and bumped into me, but I didn't react. I was standing alone, dumbstruck. Tears welled in my eyes.

How did we reach the end of childhood? I didn’t even realize we were here. 

***

Pascal’s friend who originally had the lead part in the play came down with an illness that made him unable to perform. A handful of other children also became sick that day, and multiple parts had to be redistributed. During the dress rehearsal, Pascal was asked to take over for the main role, and I was told he said yes without hesitation. His teachers saw something in him that he was not able to see. At the moment of his “yes,” part of the character I had been praying for and trying to cultivate in him blossomed. 

I spent the afternoon attempting to reconcile the boy I knew, who weeks ago said he didn’t want more than one line, with this boy who willingly took the spotlight at the last possible second. I resisted the urge to ask him a lot of questions or raise any concerns, and he didn’t come to me with any. 

He asked me to run lines with him a couple times, then said he was ready. 

Lord, make him brave, I prayed, help me let go and entrust him to you.

***

I held Pascal for the first time 24 hours after he was born at 31 weeks. I was on a magnesium drip recovering from severe preeclampsia, and he was on the other side of the hospital under the watchful eye of NICU nurses, safe and warm in his isolette. When his naked 3.5 pound body was finally laid on my naked, swollen chest, unabated sobs welled up from the depths of my soul. 

This is my child, I thought, I am his mother.

Lord, help me. I don’t know how to be a mom to this tiny baby. I need you to make me brave, I prayed.  

***

I sat in the audience with four hundred other people and watched him come alive. 

He delivered all his lines perfectly, glancing subtly at the script by his side for reminders less often than I would have ever guessed. He landed his cues, walked to where he was supposed to walk, and got laughs from the audience exactly when the lines called for it. I waited for him to panic or not know what to say, but that moment never came. 

He was no longer the little boy terrified of the stage who needed his mom to call the courage out of him. He found it all on his own. 

***

It’s not so much that I didn’t know there was an end to childhood, it’s just that I was too busy living through it to give it much thought. God’s mercies were new every day, just as he promised. Pascal and I got through sleep training, and then the tantrum-filled toddler years, and somehow by kindergarten, he found his way onto a normal growth curve after the years of prematurity kept him behind.  We learned how to manage the migraines that plagued him in early elementary school and he bravely faced an MRI machine that, to our relief, revealed no brain abnormalities. He baked muffins beside me weekly, donning his excavator patterned apron, and we spent hours at the dining room table together learning what it meant to eat the food that was provided. We spent countless afternoons outside together. Again and again, I pushed him on our backyard swing, until one day, I watched his smile from the other side as he pumped his legs back and forth on his own. Now, I no longer watch him on the playground, too nervous to see him courageously leap off the swing at maximum height and launch into the air. Milestone after milestone, Pascal grew in wisdom and stature, and I learned what it meant to be a mom.  

After the movie scene moment at the grocery store, reminders that we had reached the upper limit of Pascal’s childhood began to accumulate. When I bought him basketball shoes, he jumped over a size. Next year when I go to get him basketball shoes, he will need an adult size. He wears the same size socks as his father. He walks by the children’s section at the library and straight to the young adult one. At the dentist's office, they confirmed that he has one more cleaning before he turns 12, at which time cleanings are considered adult cleanings. 

This is the end, 

this is the end, 

this is the end, 

the world tells me. 

I will let him play in the sandbox, crafting tunnels and creating worlds as often as he wants to. I will let him sword fight with sticks and work on his rudimentary fort in the woods and climb trees to his heart’s content. I will let him dump out bins of legos and build scenes and story lines for as many Saturday afternoons as possible before we store the bins away to collect dust. I will not discourage him from childish things in favor of mature ones, but it’s obvious that his choices are rapidly changing on their own. 

***

During the last scene of the play, my cheeks began to ache from the grin plastered on my face. Pascal stood on stage wearing a prop newsboy hat and pants a little too small, with confidence and relief radiating from his face. I felt tears pooling under my eyes and blinked them away so I could clearly see the moment he stepped onto the threshold of the upper limit. I realized then, his bravery had been growing along with his legs in inches all along, and I could almost hear a faint whoosh as the final page in his chapter of childhood began to turn.

Thunderous applause filled the room when the lights came on as parents got up from their seats and filled the aisles in search of their children. I kept my eyes on Pascal, still on stage, and slowly made my way through the crowd. “Take my picture before I take off my costume,” he asked, and I gladly obliged. We both wanted to hold on to a piece of this moment forever. 

After the performance, my mind returned to the moment I was suspended in time in front of the age limit on the medicine bottle. I asked myself the same question, how did we reach the upper limit of childhood? And wondered now after seeing Pascal cross the limit on stage, how will we bravely navigate this new chapter of adolescence together?

And I knew the answer to both questions was the same:

By the grace of God, one day at a time. 

Soli Deo gloria,

Sara