Dimon Kendrick-Holmes: A different kind of waiting

On Thursday morning, a friend was telling me about the pending birth of his first child. He and his wife have prepared the nursery and attended the classes and know what to expect.

Now they're just waiting. You know, waiting to be sleep-deprived, professional diaper changers.

Listening to him talk, I felt glad to be finished with that stage of life.

I was also feeling a bit smug. Then I heard my phone ding.

I had a text from my wife. She had some news for me.

No, not that kind of news.

Sure, this column you're reading right now would actually have been memorable if my wife had been texting me to announce we were having our fifth child.

But alas, she was not.

She was texting me a photo of our third child, who just turned 15, proudly holding aloft his brand-new learner's permit.

I posted the photo on Facebook with the same caption I've used with my two eldest children: "Just what the world needs: Another teen driver."

And I got the usual responses.

Most people expressed disbelief that this son had turned 15. More than one person wrote, "No way!" His second grade teacher, Mrs. Hendricks, asked me to give him a hug for her.

I did.

A former neighbor remembered when he was in diapers and used to push a plastic lawn mower around the lawn.

Time flies.

I remember waiting for him to be born, just like I'd waited for his sister and his brother before him. I remember waiting for him to walk, and waiting for him to talk, and waiting for all those other milestones.

As my children grew older, I did a different kind of waiting: I sat with other parents and waited for some sort of practice -- baseball, ballet, band, math team, track team, science team, you name it -- to end.

And then I drove them home. Sometimes it was just one child, and we'd have a good conversation whenever I resisted the urge to share my vast wis

dom about whatever activity they'd just been practicing.

Sometimes it would be combinations of children: Maybe the oldest two, or the youngest two.

Then my daughter got her driver's license, and with it the assignment to haul around her brothers.

Today, with three teen drivers and another a couple of years away, Bess and I do a different kind of waiting.

In the mornings, we watch them drive off to school, and in the evenings we watch them magically appear for supper. I'm always happy to see them, and I think it's because all day I've been waiting.

Sometimes at night, we watch them drive off by themselves, and then we wait at home. Like all parents, we worry. We worry about drinking and driving and we worry about texting and driving. We worry about them and we worry about the other drivers on the road.

We wait for the text saying they're leaving, and then we wait to see headlights coming up the driveway.

So to my friend I say, "Get used to it, buddy."

Get used to waiting.

Dimon Kendrick-Holmes, executive editor, dkholmes@ledger-enquirer.com

This story was originally published January 23, 2015 at 10:44 PM with the headline "Dimon Kendrick-Holmes: A different kind of waiting."