Reflections of a Rebel Heart – October 2024 – Online-Only

WHEN MY SON RADEK was 2 ½ years old, he would refuse to get dressed to take his older brothers to school. Everyone in the Sacred Heart halls knew his daily uniform—ridiculously big Spider man gloves, pajamas, a wooden sword, and a plastic silver knight helmet with a split down the middle we had to duct tape. He was already walking into life declaring both his difference and willingness to defend it at all costs.

Radek resists whatever path is set for him at every turn. “I told you I didn’t want to do this,” he said, when he refused to get dressed for a soccer tournament. He didn’t want to take music lessons, preferring to teach himself. He didn’t want to stay in the grade school or the middle school and finally the high school we sent all of our other children to. “There’s no one to blame. I just don’t belong there,” he said.

Sometimes it’s impossible to know as a parent if the decisions you make, the things you impose out of love or fear for your children could have the capacity to cause pain or difficulty. We fought him on making the move because we wanted him to have the same opportunity we’d given his siblings. But for him, that’s never been the point. He wants to be who he is and trusted to weather whatever choices he makes.

He never really wanted to go to college. But for our sake, he was willing to try it. When we flew together to drop him off for his freshman year of college in Wisconsin, he spent the flight in deep conversation with a 70-year-old man who sat next to him and ended up introducing his bemused daughter to us when she arrived to pick him up. I spent most of the trip alone, walking the campus while he went through orientation. As much as he tried, I knew it would not last. He traveled to Milwaukee by bus to work for a charity, spent time volunteering, anything to get off campus.

I recently saw a video with the comedian Tig Notaro talking about her and her stepfather leaving the burial of her mother. He had never been supportive of Notaro’s career and didn’t understand her as a human being. As they drove away, he cried and told her, “I’m realizing now that it’s not the child’s responsibility to teach the parent who they are. It’s the parent’s responsibility to learn who their child is. And I didn’t do that. And I’m so sorry.”

“You have to let me fail,” he says. “I need you to trust that I’ll figure it out when I do.” His older brothers have told me the same thing. “He will figure it out, Mom. He’s Radek.”

After he told us he wasn’t going back to college, he considered working on an Alaskan fishing boat, then an oil rig, and eventually decided to fight wildfires. Before he left for Idaho, we talked for a long time on our back porch. “Why do you have to think the way you do? I don’t want to think about you worrying while I’m out there doing my job,” he said. “I’m going to worry, Radek. That’s just the way I work, it’s my operating system. No matter what a person’s operating system is, it will bring joy and it will also bring suffering. But you are not responsible for my suffering,” I said. When he teared up, I felt my heart clench. Sometimes the very thing that caused us pain as children, the thing that we promised we would not do to our own children, we can end up doing anyway because we don’t recognize that we came by it through a different path. I promised him I would try not to pepper him with questions, he promised to share more of his life without being asked.

Radek is in Idaho again now. Some days he’s in cell service and some days he’s not. Recently he sent a picture of fire creeping behind him toward a crop of trees obscured by orange smoke. He was smiling. I texted, “That is…very close to fire…”

He texted right back, “Learn about fire behavior and you’ll realize that isn’t a big deal at all.”

Eileen Bobek is a former ER Doctor and now owner of Rebel Heart Books in downtown Jacksonville.