Jonathan

This is my son Jonathan. He is twelve and one half.

You may be able to tell by looking at the pictures that Jonathan has big brown eyes and that I also have big, brown eyes.

With each of my pregnancies, I had a cloudy vision of a baby in my mind, a baby with big brown eyes and a face something like the face of my older brother, when he was young, only different.

Each time I gave birth (the first three times), I received blond, blue eyed babies with chubby cheeks. Shannon was mostly bald, but her hair came in as golden curls. DJ and Lu were actually born with short yellow curls on their heads--something entirely out of the ordinary here in Italian Syracuse.

My first three babies were beautiful, well-behaved, and astoundingly intelligent. People would stop me in the park and say, "What beautiful babies! Are you their nanny?" I tried to take this as a compliment.

When Jon was born, he was the one who finally looked like the baby in my mind. It was almost eerie. One day I had him at the library with us (he was still very small) and a lady stopped me and said, "I just have to tell you... your baby looks just like you!" You cannot imagine the effect these words had upon my soul.

Jon is different from the others. He did not let me read to him as a small child; he was always on the go. He has a severe "need" to set his own agenda and not follow anyone else's. He despises school, structure and paperwork. However, he is also extremely cheerful and social--the lone extrovert in a family of intense introverts. He has no fear of anything--I need to figure out how to help him learn a fear of God. The fear of God is the beginning of wisdom (Psalm 111:10).

I love Jon from the depth of my soul. It is a raw kind of love. With the others, I could confuse love of them with love for their accomplishments, although I try hard to guard against this. With Jon, it is very clearly love of him. I even loved him before he had a name. The others were all named before they were born, and it was just a matter of getting them out and meeting them. Jon was nameless for a day, but still so himself, and so much an object of my love.

He has enormous potential and is very quick to grasp concepts. He rarely does any homework, yet still seems to be getting good grades in accelerated math, which I remember the other kids spending a certain amount of time pursuing. His vocabulary is astounding for a child who reads as little as he does. But academic pursuits hold no appeal for him. He does the minimum to get by and seems to resent it the whole time.

What can he become when he grows up? Things that cross my mind as possibilities:

• an actor (this scares me for what might be obvious reasons, but he would be good--and he memorizes very easily when it suits him to do so)
• a chef (he is a good cook, and has an unusual flair for presentation)
• a travel guide
• a construction worker (?--not sure about this, but he does like to do things with his hands, and has an uncanny ability to manipulate 3-D shapes in his head)
• a musician (he is really good at his trumpet--again with amazingly little practice, but to go into music I think he would have to get back to piano which was a struggle we gave up)
• a missionary pilot. Yes, this I can see, although I am not sure I want to.

Don't you just wish God would clue you in to His plans for your children so you would know how to encourage them?