Into the Sunset…

While I grow older, so do the children.  Karen, who celebrated her eighteenth birthday, is making us all proud by taking a full year volunteering with unprivileged children, teaching them English, in Israel.  Tamary, a young woman, is with her mother in New Jersey.  Shiri and Guy, nine and a half and five and a half respectively, are still living with us.

The young ones are busy all the time.  Shiri with homework, books, TV shows and many many girlfriends.  Guy’s job is to work us.  He has us both under his thumb.  Making sure we have enough chores to satisfy his growing needs.  Preparing vegetable free meals – he is very particular about vegetables, in fact, if there are any on the table, he would simply leave the table, covering his nose with his little fingers.  He likes to color, watch TV, as long as the shows are different than the ones his sister is watching.  He falls asleep in front of the TV, to be carried to bed later.  In short, being the little kid that he is, he occupies us all the time.  Mist of the time, in a very charming and pleasant way.

But like maturing parents that we are, and given that we just returned to Israel after a few years, and given that Dorit’s parents live about an hour away, and that they love the kids, and the kids love them back, and that the grandparents live in a rural environment, with fresh air and lots of greenery, and after being prompted numerous times, by all sides involved, we finally decided.  The kids were going to spend the weekend by their grandparents at the kibbutz.

We packed pajamas, multiple outfits, tooth brushes and toothpaste, the favorite teddy bears, and off we went.  Not without worries.  We were worried that Shiri would call us in the middle of the night to be picked up, and that Guy would miss us so much that we would have to drop everything and go see them.  We drove to the Kibbutz in the evening, and stayed there until after 9:00 PM just to make sure that everything is cool before we left.  When it was time to go, the kids looked at us, threw us a kiss, and went back to their business.  We stood outside the door for a couple of minutes, just to make sure.  But there was no alarm.  We left.

We checked our cellular phones every five minutes, just to make sure we didn’t miss a call.  We didn’t.  We called a little after 10:00 PM to see if Guy was already sleeping.  He wasn’t.  Everything was pretty cool.

We, on the other hand, were falling asleep.  We met with our best friends at about 10:00 PM.  An hour and a half later we were already driving home.  Dorit slept all the way.  We went to sleep as soon as we got home.  During the night, we both went to check on the kids.  The first time, I was scared out of my skin: “where are the kids?”.  The second time, I realized that I was missing them.  The third time, I realized, they are growing independent, and that soon enough rather than hoping to get a child-free minute, I’d be begging them to forfeit their time with their friends fir boring time with the elderly couple – their parents.

When we finally met, they said hello, no excitement registered.  When we asked if we were missed, the were honest, as we taught them to be.  They said not that much.  To make a long story short.  Rather than enjoying a weekend without the children, we felt we were abandoned by the children.  Go figure…