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My Own Personal Sky

~ what I'm learning while growing up

My Own Personal Sky

Tag Archives: Ecuador

Home sweet home

19 Friday Apr 2013

Posted by paffenbutler in Being Yourself, On Being Responsive, Parents

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

being yourself, Ecuador, Jane Butler, Jane Paffenbarger Butler, security

There’s a tree growing out of our deck, a great big poplar that has been getting taller for the twenty-five years we’ve been here. I was charmed by its placement the first time I saw the house. So we’ve kept trimming the boards around the hole it grows out of to accommodate its increasing girth, but it is getting so large that to let it go much longer will require a bank heist to fund its inevitable removal.

So on a Sunday afternoon phone call recently we casually mentioned to our son whose down in Ecuador about our plan, and he hit the roof.

“That’s the coolest thing about the whole house. You can take that tree down!”

The longer our man-boy is away from home the more we see he actually likes it here. And he is reporting that he likes us too. He is on month nine of a ten-month exchange trip to Ecuador and I cannot wait to see what kind of kid I get back. We practically kicked him out the door as he left last August, so glad we were to change things up a bit. He’d grown up in our house and had just graduated high school, but the sense of entitlement we’d somehow fostered during that time was not very attractive. He wasn’t terrible but he clearly was in need of a look around at some other people’s lives.

Since he left he’s had experiences I could not have dreamed up if I’d tried, to inspire a sense of gratitude for the life he’ll be returning to. My favorite story is of him translating between dental students on a mission trip from the US and poor Ecuadorian children unfamiliar with dental hygiene brought in to have most of their rotted teeth removed. But he’s also learning about being a gracious guest, about managing his money, about giant extended families that get together regularly, about being an ambassador of America, about the privilege of knowing where he comes from, about the privilege of having an education, a home and healthy food to return to, and all of this is a joy to witness.

Hearing him say he loves the tree in our deck makes me think it represents something more to him than I realize. At this point he is not above saying he misses us and home in general, so we’ll just wait a few more weeks for him to return before we get the cherry picker out here to start dismantling the tree that has been outside his bedroom window for the whole of his life.

Maybe then he will tell me what it is about it that matters to him so much. Maybe then I will point out that whatever that thing is, I feel confident it is not going anywhere when the tree comes down.

Check out Andrew’s blog on the link at the bottom of this page, on the left. Just click on the picture of him standing in front of a volcano.

Some joy to balance the pain

08 Saturday Sep 2012

Posted by paffenbutler in Being Yourself, Parents

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

being yourself, change, control, dehydration, dreams coming true, Ecuador, exchange student, express feelings, fear, friends, goals, inspire, joy, letting go, mother-in-law, parents, play, security, South America, trust, weather

I am feeling a little of the balance of life today. We buried my aunt’s ashes last weekend, and we buried my mother-in-law a few weeks before that, but now, today I am feeling the joy of seeing my son stand happily in exactly the right place. He went missing for a few days, at least at our end here in America, and with warnings of a tsunami on the western coast of South America, and his failure to respond to emails and texts or to post anything to his blog or Facebook, we felt a little alarmed. Where did our kid who contacts us three times a day one way or another go?

When we finally connected on day four he said he’d been off to the coast at a three-day language camp for foreigners intending to study in Ecuador for the year, and there was no WiFi, and by the way, I am busy now and I’ve got to go. According to his blog posts thereafter he’d been terribly sick with symptoms of dehydration as well as had tons of fun meeting people and playing hard.

We will learn to fully let go through experiences like this one I hope. This one is helpful because it seems apparent that we have guided him to just where he needs to be. Or so it seems right now. He is out in the wide world having thrilling experiences. He’s happy, he’s taking care of himself and surviving despite himself. He’s meeting people and learning and growing and finding his place in the world. We could not be happier for him.

So being told he is alive and well, and in his usual way, quite busy having a good time so let me go already, was all we needed to hear in order to be able to rest comfortably in the idea that maybe we have led him to his adulthood ready to go.

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