Published: August 26, 2008 11:05 pm      

Launching another child still causes pain in the heart

EDMOND — The past few weeks have seen big changes around our house. Our fifth child, Daniel left for the Missionary Training Center to prepare to be a missionary in Mongolia for the next two years. He’d been looking forward to going since he was a little tot and went in eagerly, but it is certainly a bittersweet time for his family. The welcoming official made the usual joke about the suggestion they keep getting to send 16 year olds instead of nineteen year olds. Sixteen-year-olds know everything and nobody would cry when they left them.

Today Daniel writes that the language is hard, but he’s progressing quickly. He likes the all-you-can-eat-buffets they offer at the MTC, as I knew he would. He’ll go to Mongolia in November and I have the impression that his diet will change a bit. Mongolians eat a lot of meat — horse, camel and yak. We hear they can buy vegetables and fruit in markets, but with the average annual temperature in Ulaanbaatar being 29 degrees Fahrenheit, I imagine that everything is imported.

The effect of launching yet another child into the world of official adulthood has other implications. There are only two children left at home and that means that they must take turns every other night doing the dishes. It hasn’t really worked out that way yet though, since I make them do them over the next evening if they don’t finish the job. So far my 12-year-old does them about twice as often as the 16-year-old. They both need to adjust to the sure knowledge that life isn’t fair and get over it.

I told Daniel to pack up all his clothes and belongings that he wasn’t taking with him in plastic storage bins. I expected his room to be tidy when he left with a few bins waiting to be stored in the attic. Of course, I was ignoring one of Einstein’s laws of physics, which says “You can’t fit a bunch of junk that nobody claims from the corner of the closet into a plastic bin, no matter how many bins you buy.” He assured me that he put everything he wants to keep in the bins, and I’m going to take him at his word and donate the mountain of miscellany that he left.

Daniel is 6-foot 3-inches tall and weighs about 210 pounds. He’s built like Atlas and all that muscle is hungry. As I made meal plans for my how-to-eat-well-on -$75-a-week column, I was allowing for four good appetites. With Daniel gone, I realize that I drastically overestimated the amount of food actually consumed by a family of four. I should have written, “How a family of four or Daniel can eat very, very well on $75. a week.”

We make a deal with our children that if they save all his money to pay for his mission and college, we would pay all of his other expenses, including transportation and insurance until he left. He didn’t have a car when he was away at school last year and he did indeed save everything he could. But now our gasoline and insurance bill is cut in half and I’m beginning to realize that our children have really nice parents. He worked in OKC and just keeping him in wheels cost about $250 a month.

I tried to cancel his phone and found that Sprint wanted $200 to remove one phone from our family plan. I decided to leave it active for another year. At least he won’t be using up our shared minutes.

This is the fifth time my husband and I have sent a missionary, so we anticipated the silver linings that come with two years of not seeing them. He’ll call on the phone only on Mother’s day and Christmas and (heaven-forbid) emergencies. We’ll pay $400. per month, mostly from his account, to cover his living expenses.

For ours and his sacrifice, he’ll come home a bilingual, mature Christian man. A strong character will have solidified in his ethic and he will never again underestimate the blessing of being an American. He’ll have learned to live with people very different from himself, to forgive his companion and to apologize for his offenses. The saying goes that every missionary has at least one convert, and that’s himself.

I know it will be worth it, but for now all the savings on grocery bills, insurance and the gas card remind me of that sore place made when we said goodbye.

Last week our 12-year-old was diagnosed with a heart murmur, and the timing seems symbolic. I have learned that murmurs are common, but when he’s missing his brother so much, I wonder if it’s the physical manifestation of an emotional condition. I expect the cardiologist to tell us that it’s an “innocent” murmur that will improve with time. Experience teaches me that time will soothe the hole in my heart, too.

Beth Stephenson is an Edmond resident.