Growing up independent

As our children have grown they have insisted that they were ready to try things by themselves.
If I don’t think about the way they looked after their first week of camp, I think they might actually be ready. One came home with a suitcase of clean, unpacked clothes. At least he was cleaner than a friend’s son who only had wet his hair under the shower and taken a daily swim in the dirty pond water.
I never did figure out if another son had changed his clothes. All his clothes were dirty from the rocks he had seen and collected along the path, at the pond or on the game field. If he liked-em, he packed’em dirt and all into his suitcase of clothes. By the time I picked up him and his suitcase, it was so heavy my arm was about jerked out of its socket. I told him his pet rocks would like it better outside under the eaves where there was lots of fresh water.
Fresh water would have helped when m stepson decided he didn’t need us to explain anything before he tackled the Cub Scouts section on making and labeling the collection. For several days he came home from school with a lunch box filled with trash. Every afternoon I dumped it into the trash can and wondered why he had not discarded it at school. One day he caught me dumping out his lunch box. “Wait don’t throw away those straws. They are my collection.”
“Your collection?”
“Yes, for Cub Scouts. I’m collecting milk straws.”
I struggled that he might want to consider another more traditional kind of collection than used milk straws that had been jammed into a lunch box and jammed into a lunch box and left in a hot room all afternoon. It wasn’t as unique, but his den mother preferred his clean, dry rock collection.
Granted at 8 to 10 years-old a child still needs parental reminders, but by 12, Teen Missions International considered my children old enough to participate on a summer mission trip.
One spent the summer enduring Australia’s mild winter working at a camp. To keep warm, he wore socks day night and day. He returned with stinky shoes and a threatening case of jungle rot.
The one who worked as a Haitian orphanage kept his feet air out. Plus, a substantial part of the rest of him, a we discovered the first day back. My husband asked about an expensive pair of work gloves he had sent for cement work. “Ohhh, those men didn’t have any. And I wasn’t going to need them anymore.”
When I dumped out his bag to wash his clothes, he had a third of what he had left with. “What happened to all your clothes?” I gasped.
He brushed me off with a vague, “The kids who washed my clothes have them.”
He noticed that the kids at the orphanage lacked a lot of things that he had in abundance. He did not simply feel sorry for them, he let them have what he could do without. Nothing we adults said about the cost of his clothes or that he needed some for himself mattered.
I hope he never grows up and figures it out any differently.