Jakeroo

I have been trying to write this blog now for two weeks and quite simply have not been able to find the time in my schedule or my mind to give Jacob the attention that he deserves through the written word. I won’t bore you with the details of the craziness that has kept me from this place. Today is no different, but I am here at the end of another work week that got whisked out from under me. Before my rear hits the floor and I wonder how it all happened, I’m going to tell you about Jake and what sets him apart.

Although I described Ben as an overconfident, comical, and sometimes angry little man, my goal with these two blogs is not to portray the boys as caricatures of themselves and broadly generalizing images of starkly contrasting good/evil personalities… they are way too complex to paint with that wide of a brush. Instead, my hope is to somehow give a glimpse of how even sharing the same DNA, God has created them both so uniquely and wonderfully… as he’s done with all of us. I know they are difficult to tell apart and it’s easier to simply call them “the twins,” but whenever I feel their distinctiveness is overlooked and they are seen as a unit because of the novelty of duplicity, there’s a part of me that wants to plead “They can’t help it that the egg split into two for some reason! They are so special apart from one another, too! Please let them know it!”

I know— MY issue. On to Jake.

The best way I can describe Jake is that he’s a pillow. He’s soft and snuggly and sweet and incredibly easygoing. It’s so hard to separate nature from nurture, but Hilton and I often wonder if his laidback characteristic came from his six days in the NICU after birth. Probably the healthiest baby in the unit, he learned to lay flat on his back under the bilirubin lights with his little sunglasses on, wearing nothing but a diaper and lots of tubes and wires and surrounded by beeping noises, monitors, and all the other chaos of a NICU. Totally comfortable, he progressed at a much faster rate than anticipated and would show the doctors when he was ready to move on to the next stage by ripping tubes and wires out with his little preemie newborn fingers, including twice removing the gastric tube fed down through his nose, despite having it taped firmly to his face the second time.

He was and has always been just ahead of Ben in terms of weight and his bones and structure have always felt more solid. We were never sure if it was just his nature or the fact, the fact that he ate more reliably, or that he had more meat on his bones to sustain him, but he rarely screamed to be fed, in contrast to Ben-the-fire-alarm. Jake would wake slowly and quietly and politely begin making murmuring noises. “Hello, it’s me, Jake,” he seemed to be saying. “Whenever you get around to it, it’d be great if you could feed me.” After a month or so I began feeling terrible that he always got fed last simply because I knew he’d tolerate it, just one small piece of the guilt baggage I carried around trying to split my resources equally.

I’m happy to say that despite our screw-ups, his sweet, good-natured ways haven’t left him. This is going to sound disgustingly biased on so many levels, but Jake is quite simply one of the most sensitive, nurturing, giving children I’ve ever come across. When given the opportunity to give his resources away for someone/something else or use it for his own needs, 99.9% of the time he will selflessly give it away. We try to be realistic about our finances when talking to the boys, and if Jake has an inkling that we can’t afford something (for something clearly not intended for him), he will pipe up that we can have his money he’s saved in his piggy bank. We have a sliding glass door with a finicky lock that needs to be replaced. The whole process has taken some time, and Jake asked me last week if he needed “to give us some money to get that door fixed.” When the earthquake hit Haiti last winter, it was Jake who over and over wanted to send all his money “up to the people in Haiti.”

He has a servant’s heart that I can only attribute to his daddy. I will never forget his first self-initiated and self-led prayer, in which he prayed “that all of those who were poor were helped by their neighbors.” Months later, he prayed for someone we knew who’d lost two loved ones within weeks of each other that the person would have people around him to make him not feel sad anymore. Did you catch that? He didn’t pray for God to simply do this or that… he prayed that God would use other people to help the situation. We are the hands and feet of God, and I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to say that Jake gets that.


Agreeable and hardworking to a fault, Jake will take criticism and take it to heart, something I have to be mindful of when coaching him to do anything the right way. I see him realize he’s messed up on something and I cringe as I watch him process it and try his guts out trying to make it better. I’ll never forget him seeing him sit on the toilet when he was learning to potty-train. So proud of himself and eager to please with a success, he’d ask, “Dat make mama hey-appy [happy]?” With his big ole soft almond eyes and sweet accent, you’d have to be a coldhearted you-know-what to not be melted by that.

Ben will self-destruct immediately because he hates being told what to do, but I worry Jake will self-destruct further down the road from the burnout that I know firsthand comes from being so dang hard on yourself. If you examine the photos of him carefully, you’ll even see the difference in their expressions that tell the story: Ben is carefree, impish, wild. Jake is studied, inward, almost self-conscious. Again, I want to take out the parts of me I see in him and delete them…. But it would make him not Jake, so I try to steer them in a healthy way.


This sensitivity plays out in other ways that have broken my heart and will no doubt continue to do so. Such consideration and intuitiveness don’t come without a great deal of inward thinking and thought, and co-dependency is so often borne out of it. I hate to say it, but he comes by it naturally through his mother’s lineage. In fact, my sister says I should just go ahead and enroll him in therapy for it—and she might be right. It’s not uncommon for Jake to be wronged by some kids at school, notify the teacher, and then be nearly sick with sadness as he sees the kids sit in timeout during recess because they got in trouble. Sometimes the worst part of his day is seeing other kids get in trouble. I’ve even seen him trying to give away his hard-earned money through our chart system for being good to Ben, who’s had a rough day and lost some money here and there. To these things, I repetitively pull him aside and given him the same gentle but firm talking-to I have to give myself periodically as well: you can pray for your brother and your friends, you can help remind them, you can be a good example, and you can love them, but you are NOT responsible for what they do. You focus on how YOU behave and trust God it will be okay.”


I’ve gone on long enough speaking about his sensitivity, and lest you think that’s he’s all rainbows and teddybears, I’ll speak to Jake’s other attributes. While Ben has an in-your-face, completely quirky, strange-old-man funkiness to him, Jake has a subtle, sly, passive-aggressive twist to his wit. Rarely going after Ben directly, he’ll often casually do something that might seem like a coincidence but it is anything but. Like tripping and “accidentally” knocking down Ben’s wall of bricks he’s built. Or singing a song he knows Ben can’t stand just loud enough for Ben to hear in the backseat but not loud enough for us. Or refusing to play a game Ben wants to do just for spite. It’s an “I’m-not-touching-you” strategy as he holds his finger in front of his face that just goes right through Ben. And Jake knows it. Let me just say that disciplining this type of disobedience is much more difficult than dealing with Ben, who’s more likely to just smack Jake in the face and walk off. Often a spectator in watching Ben sabotage his evenings with meltdowns, he’ll sit on the sidelines and helpfully hand out parenting pointers to Hilton and me. “Give him a spanking, Daddy. Get him. Don’t let him have any candy, either.” Thanks Jake.

It’s Jake’s cleverness and sharpness that makes me think he’ll be a lawyer some day. He’s the king of finding a loophole, clearly calling you out for ambiguity or failure to follow through on some random promise or rule you’ve made, whether it’s in regards to whether fruit qualifies as a dessert or if I said we’d be going up to Nana and Boppaw’s for the day or to Huntington in general. He forgets nothing, and there is meaning in EVERYTHING.

I’ll close with this recent interaction between the two of them. I was rushing around the kitchen trying to clean up and asked if one of them could do me a favor and take a stack of mail to Hilton’s office. They were both in foul moods and neither of them wanted to do it, so they began bickering.

“Alright, alright, boys,” I interrupted. “What would Jesus do?”

“He’d do it,” Ben reluctantly, clearly indignant.

“Okay, so who’s gonna be Jesus here?” I asked.

The answer came with no hesitation from Ben.

“Jake is.”

And with that, Jake took the mail.

Still makes me laugh just remembering it.