I love this quote from Ernst Hemmingway. It describes major events so succinctly. I promise that this will be the last time that I wax emotionally about my summer of exchange. But first I have to use this quote the way it has impacted my life.

Sunday morning, my wife and I were eating breakfast. We were at the darkest hour of this whole program. My youngest son had just landed in Taiwan in the middle of the night. My older son was on the airplane on his way back home. We had to leave back to the airport in three hours to pick him up.

I think that I dealt with my emotions last week. That is what translated into the last couple of posts. I am now starting to see the bright side of things, not what has changed. Something I rarely do, I was talking about the things that were in the near future to my wife. “I am planning on going to the range on Friday. I want to go on a weeknight ahead of hunting season. The range is bound to be crawling with people on the weekend.”

Usually I wait to see if there is something on the calendar and strike at the last minute. “There is nothing going on tomorrow (or this afternoon), I think I will go to the range.” On top of that, I said that I was planning on going to central Oregon for a weekend of hunting. I might even make it a three day weekend. I am not going to have more than a day or two of PTO now that I have started this new job.

My wife said, “It’s funny. You never talk like this. You never express something that you want to do ahead of time.” She theorized that we haven’t had the luxury of only looking at our own schedule in a long, long time. It’s true. My older son is not nearly as involved in activities and he has his own vehicle if he does choose to do something. I am not saying that we wouldn’t support or watch, but we don’t have to transport and hang around until it is over nor is it in overwhelming quantities.

I turned the oven on to keep the bacon warm. It also tends to really crisp up things as well. I pulled my vegetarian’s skillet out as I do multiple times a week and I realized I do not have to handle this hundreds of times in the next year. I told my wife, I am going to put this skillet away for the next year. All of the sudden our life just became simpler and better.

I support my son’s decisions, including being a vegetarian. But, I didn’t realize the commitment and impact that one decision has on others. It effects how I prep, how I handle ingredients, how I cook and how I store leftovers. It effects what I choose to make for dinner as well as quantities.

For the last five years, every meal has had multiple dimensions. What is my son going to eat? How am I going to make this appeal to both camps? How do I portion this so that it doesn’t contact meat and dirty utensils and serve everything at the same time? To add insult to the situation, many times I take all that care and he schedules something over the top of that. Consequently, all that care I took doesn’t get eaten later in the evening and some vegetarian product is made instead causing more dishes that I wake up to in the morning.

As a parent, I want nothing more than enabling my son to grow up into a empowered adult. I want them to be confident about the decisions that they make; I want them to be able to justify their decisions as thoughtful and considering the upside and downsides of the situation. I think that I am missing something however. I am missing the conscientious part of the equation. How does my decision effect others.

Everyone in the house is acutely aware that he has made a decision to be vegetarian. We all make some sort of accommodations in order to support that decision, some more than others. But, does the vegetarian appreciate the compromises that we have all made to support the decision? Does he know how many times I have to move the skillet out of the oven in a year? Does he know that we check with the event host to let them know that there needs to be a cheese pizza not just one that has the meat picked off?

I started this off with gradually, then suddenly. Supporting a household vegetarian is the same way. All of the sudden it has become an entire way of how I cook and to a larger extent how I live. I want him to play chess and music and participate in sports and Boy Scouts if that is what makes him happy. I didn’t really get that effort was in exchange for my own life force.

End Your Programming Routine: I am not saying that things won’t go back to the way they were before the exchange when he comes back. Again, I support my children. But, it will be under the guise that I understand that I am making a conscious decision to do so. I do hope that this is a growth experience for him and maybe I will share this at some point in the future. For now, we are on a bit of vacation for some of this. At least this is how it feels right now.