One minute you’re teaching the ABC song, and what seems minutes later he needs help with homework. It’s seventh grade English, and you say an adjective is anything a squirrel can do to a tree: go up it, around it, or over it. He brings home an F on the assignment, and you remember the squirrel example is about prepositions, not adjectives.

You’ve taught him not to hit girls, and he says a girl at school hit him. She didn’t get licks, but he did because he slammed his locker door too loud. Somehow he left out the part that the locker incident was during the morning prayer.

Two seconds later he’s a freshman, just found the material for a cowboy shirt under his bed needed for a chorus program that weekend. He looks to you for help, and you think he should know better than that, but realize you’re standing in his way. He needs to get to the phone to call his grandma. She loads up her sewing machine and drives 65 miles to help him, but she did make him pin and cut out the material. My only help was to loan him one of my western belts because his dad’s were too small for him.

In the blink of an eye that six-foot-something boy is a high school junior. Seventh and eighth grade girls are calling the house for him. That called for the talk with him, again, about girls, emotions and consequences. Then there’s a frantic call at the office from another boy’s mom who said they were in a wreck on a dirt road south of town. So much for the thought he was at school, but he didn’t have a car so he couldn’t have been driving. He wasn’t, and when we go there I ran to the car, and hugged him before I gave him what for.

He made a contract with us when he was a senior: he’d keep his grades up and could drive my old car. Two weeks later when the officer dropped off the weekly police reports I was told: “You’d better tell your son to slow down coming out of the school parking lot.” The officer was surprised when I told him, “No, you’d better tell him, and give him a ticket. He doesn’t have a job and his Mommy and Daddy won’t pay the fine.” I was upset that they never stopped him.

After high school he was off to college to follow his dream of becoming a chef. It may have been my lack of cooking that encouraged his talents. He’d made calls to my friends, and his grandmother, to get their recipes. Then one night he came by a club meeting to see me. He was excited. Excited for me to meet the girl in the little red sports car parked in front of the high school. After I met her, my son walked me up to the door. “Isn’t she beautiful? She’s 25 years old,” he said. In my sweetest mother voice I said, “She’s 35 if she’s a day!” or maybe that’s what I wanted to say.

He came back home after he’d skipped classes too many times to be with Miss Corvette. I gave him six weeks to find a job, gave him warnings each week, then told him he had until midnight. He didn’t believe me. Maybe I shouldn’t have counted one, two, three when he was little. After he left we didn’t hear from him for two weeks. He was so tender-hearted, and gullible, and I assumed he was dead in the trunk of some maniac’s car, and wished I hadn’t made him leave. When he called to say he was in Tulsa with his friend, Mike, I was more than relieved. Then a couple of weeks later he called us from the Tulsa City Jail because of speeding tickets.

He was soon working in Tulsa and paying his own tickets, but came home a couple of times over the next few years to help get the paper out when we couldn’t find computer, or darkroom, help. Then there was the football injury his dad suffered when taking game pictures that also brought him to our rescue. That’s also when he started working in law enforcement. It was something he’d been interested in, but maybe his grandfather’s work made him decide to wear a badge, too.

Memories of my little towheaded boy who brought me dandelions are in my thoughts this Mother’s Day and graduation time. Same goes for the teenager/20something son who made me want to kiss him one minute, curse him the next, especially when he decided to grow a ponytail that I made him hide at his grandmother’s retirement party. It’s memories of the loving man and father whose hair disappeared and caused him to shave his head, and who isn’t with us any more, that bring me to tears, and miss him even more.