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Front Porch: Even in adulthood, sons still cause mother worry

I just hate it when a conversation with one of my sons begins with “Mom, I’ve got something to tell you. Don’t be upset.”

When they were in high school or younger, that usually meant a fender-bender or an arm broken while at a friend’s house. You’d think that now that they’re well into adulthood, that chest-tightening, breath-stealing reaction wouldn’t kick in. But it does.

Earlier this year one of my sons called after returning from a short vacation. “I need to tell you something, Mom, but I want you to know I’m OK.” Breathing slowly and speaking calmly, I said: “OK, honey, what happened?”

Seems that on the flight from Seattle to Denver, he got out of his seat to go to the bathroom. Upon standing, he promptly passed out. Apparently there’s a protocol the air crew institutes in such cases. Do they have to divert? Can the passenger be brought around? Is it life-threatening? He was hauled to the back of the plane and brought around. His blood pressure was taken and was very low. He seemed dehydrated. He drank lots of water and was monitored until landing in Denver.

Then all the passengers had to stay seated as he was taken off on a gurney by paramedics. He was pretty embarrassed by that point. There at the airport he had an EKG and other tests before being released to continue on the next leg of his journey. He checked with his doctor upon returning to Seattle, and this does look like a case of dehydration combined with allergy medication.

Trying to make the story have a funny ending, he said that when he was on a beach chair in sunny Mexico, with a delightful beverage in hand, and he saw all those tanned bodies walking by the shore wearing scant clothing, he decided that he must have died on the plane – and that he was now in heaven.

I’m now finally beginning to smile – a little bit – at his upbeat effort to put a good spin on a scary thing. It’s taken a little time for me to get there.

Sometimes the maternal gut check arrives without the benefit of knowing that a scary moment is approaching.

A number of years ago our other son was home for a visit. Some years before that, in his post-college days, he had been backpacking through India and Ladakh, and he was relating a story to us from that time. It was a fun and interesting story about a houseboat he and some British hikers had rented. As he spoke, he mentioned in passing that they had planned to go into Srinagar to buy supplies for an upcoming hike.

Now whenever he traveled I would spend time with a map, looking at destinations and terrain and distances and all that. So I began running a visual of the map of that part of the world in the back of my brain as he continued speaking. And after a minute or two, sure enough it clicked into place.

“Srinagar,” I exclaimed, voice rising. “Srinagar, that’s the capital of Kashmir! What on earth were you doing in Kashmir? Donald Hutchings! Kidnapping! Death!”

Now he never promised me he wouldn’t go there exactly, but I kind of assumed.

He saw how upset I was that mentioning Srinagar unintentionally revealed he had ventured into Kashmir, so he tried to defuse the moment and also calm me down. So he hastily added, “Don’t worry, Mom, as it turns out we never went into the market. It got blown up the day before.”

Not reassuring.

There’s something about sons in peril – or potential peril – that raises all kinds of reactions in me, even way after the event, even after I know clearly that they are safe, even when the stress-causing event can – when told right – come across as an interesting adventure.

The days are long gone when young sons needed their mother to kiss an injury to make it better or hold on to a broken boy who has fallen from a tree as Dad drives us to the hospital. And I am happy that as adults they will still tell us about things that go wrong, even when they sometimes back into the story without intending to. As parents, we want to be there for all of it.

I am a woman with gray hair. Most of it has come naturally, the consequence of genetics and of aging. But a lot of it has been put there one at a time by sons.

Voices correspondent Stefanie Pettit can be reached by email at upwindsailor@comcast.net. Previous columns are available at spokesman.com/columnists.

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