electric mist

turning corners

It is the end of an era around here; Jake has taken his last final, has turned in his last book and will graduate on the 17th. My baby is finished with high school. I sit here at my desk, both happy at the moment, and sad. It's been a difficult road for us with his learning obstacles (dysgraphia, ADD), and frustrating for him. I've seen moments when he just couldn't wrap his mind around the unfairness of it all -- there are people in his class who have the common sense and the IQ of a blade of grass, but they memorize well and so do well in school, whereas Jake, with a high IQ, struggles. But that's life, I suppose. There will always be an obstacle of some sort, and he's won this round. On to the next.

I feel a sense of joy and relief that this part of my life is over. No more having to get up super early to make sure that he's up and off to school. He was pretty good about taking care of himself in that manner, and rarely overslept, so it's not like I absolutely had to do that... but old habits die hard and I knew that he did sleep like the dead, so I might as well get up and make sure rather than lie there and wonder if he heard the alarm. Still... not going to do that for college. (What do you want to bet this child tries to take all afternoon classes?) No more worrying about whether or not he's going to make it through school. He will either do okay in college and get a degree, or he won't. I don't think college is for everyone, and have a lot of family and friends who are very successful without college, so it's not necessarily a benchmark of what's going to happen in life.

This is a line drawn in the sand of time marking before and after, marking a moment of transition, of moving on into adulthood. I'm grateful for that line, for the freedom it brings to me to know that we made it this far. I'm sad, too. Because gone is my little boy, the chubby cheeked, big smiling faced imp who regularly crawled into my lap for big hugs, who brought frogs into his room so they could play, who loved to run faster than anyone around him, whose face lit up with joy at the simplest things, like a surprise popsicle on a hot summer day. I wish I could have those memories alive around me, just one more time. To see both boys running into the house or wrestling together, or staking out the perfect place for the perfect fort. I crane my head because I hear something, and it almost sounds like laughter under a blanket tent in their room, and if I turn that corner in the hall, I might have to duck to avoid the (paper) "grenade" lobbed at me, amid one of them laughing and the other one shushing, and then me dropping down, sneaking up on them, and attacking (tickling) them. If I turn that corner, they will still be there, just like that, twelve and eight, having packed a picnic lunch from the kitchen and hauled it all the way to the tent (their bedroom), because they were going to be gone for a very long time. It I turn that corner, they will still want me to sing them to sleep, not yet having decided they were too old for that, or for me reading to them, or simply snuggling. It is the thing about being a mom that people can't really tell you when you start out -- that every time you turn a corner, it vanishes behind you, and one day? One day, you will turn a corner and they will be gone and grown and living their own lives. They don't tell you that, and even if they had, it's too hard to understand until you're sitting at a desk, wondering where the giggling's coming from and you realize, it's just a memory.