Last Christmas, in a flurry of creative energy, I hit Pinterest and tried several new crafts and recipes. Something about the holiday season tends to spark that kind of excitement in me. This morning, for example, I’m trying baking soda ornaments for the first time. Not because our tree has any room for more ornaments (it doesn’t) but because it sounds like a fun, memory-making endeavor. Not very minimalist of me, but there it is.
The 2019 version of “why not?” was a clear plastic ball with a length of ribbon cut to the height of each of the five younger children. It was super easy, very cheap, and, might I say, pretty cute. The kids were thrilled making them, though I do advise being on hand for assisting younger fingers press that pesky ribbon into that tiny opening on top. This year, of course, the ribbons had to come out and be held against those growing bodies. And naturally, everyone had grown. Even Phin had gained a fraction of an inch, which was quite a happy thing to see.
But oh, John Mark.
It hasn’t escaped me that my sweet, brown-eyed, dimpled little boy has been morphing into a young man. I’ve watched his face change this year, the proportions shifting to reveal more angles, the fine line of dark fuzz barely beginning to show on his upper lip. I’ve witnessed his shock register as his voice has cracked unexpectedly, seen his surprise as he’s pulled on the pants he wore the week before and found them to be shorter than he remembered.
He is twelve, and for two (now three) of my boys, twelve has been the age in which the body surges forward, creating space and ability for all that the mind will struggle to become over the next handful of emotional years. It’s humbling to witness this, the slow shift from one form to another. In girls, it seems less stark, somehow, to me. But in boys… one day I am leaning down to press my lips to the forehead of my sweet little guy, and the next, I am hugging the unmistakable body of a man, face to face with all that this means.
So all of this was known, all of it understood, as we carefully pulled the red ribbon from John Mark’s ornament. And still, I was shocked.
Five inches.
My baby boy grew five inches in twelve months.
No wonder his Essentials tutor saw him this fall for the first time and said, “Wow. He grew!” No wonder he can reach things from the top of the pantry for me. No wonder he needed men’s shoes, and pants, and couldn’t squeeze into a Youth Large work coat when the weather turned.
He’s 5’5″. Not quite the size of a full-grown man, but close. So close.
Emotionally, John Mark is standing on that strange brink of little and big. He still loves building with Legos, and listening to Jonathan Park cds, and lining up plastic army guys with his younger brothers and staging epic battles with rubber bands. But he’s changing. He’s never flinched from a full day of truly man-sized farm work, but he now has the endurance and physical strength to dig post holes for hours, or be a thrower when hay bales need to be loaded onto the back of a moving trailer, or hold the line as men brace a barn. He gravitates to the basketball court rather than the playground at lunch on community days. He is more interested in Axis and Allies than Risk.
I’ve lived this enough times now to know that I will look back in six years and feel that twelve was still so, so little. Those few soft corners remaining on his cheeks will have melted away, and I will have to stand on my tippy toes to wrap my arms around those broad shoulders. I will look back on the Christmas when he still asked for a Lego kit and sigh. He will be so far from his days of thumb sucking and dragging his oversized, minky ni-ni everywhere that I will have to strain to remember the weight of his solid little body as it balanced on my hip. I can still see this in him now, but not for much longer. Not this close.
Today he will make baking soda ornaments. He will be genuinely excited to roll out his dough, and will likely mold and reshape and start over and over again, because he is a perfectionist and never satisfied with how his hands craft what his mind sees. But ultimately, he will make something— perhaps a Star Wars ship, or an F1 car. I can only hope he leaves some fingerprint behind, some little bit of evidence of the John Mark here now, at twelve. Something I can smile at next Christmas, and the Christmases that come after, all the way until the day I am boxing his ornaments up to send to his own home, to hang on his own tree.
He’s stepping closer to that reality every day. They all are. This year, I just had proof. A solid piece of data. A fact. This year, I saw tangible evidence of the almost invisible process of growth God is working in the life of my family. It is beautiful, and sad, and humbling… and growing for me, as well.