Last week, my oldest child started high school. I will admit to having a bit of a freakout session a couple of weeks before school started, thinking about all the things I had to get done and what the year would bring, as far as transporting even just my high schooler around, much less his other three school age siblings. That was just about me and how I was going to cope with high school. Then I was freaking out about how he was going to cope with high school. His high school is the size of a small college campus, and I can barely navigate that place, but it's normal to the people here. The list of fears for him was rather extensive and increasingly preposterous, but nonetheless real. And here we are a week in and he hasn't come home crying even once. He's even taken the city bus home a couple of times without incident.
When he started kindergarten, I was so relieved to have time apart every day that I didn't think about what it meant--plus I had two other kids at home to deal with who were very needy and busy. The craziest thing about it to me was that I remembered kindergarten from my own life, and now my son would have that set of memories, and they don't include me. Up to that point, we were together most of the time and I had input (not control--ha!) in what we did and how things went, and I could see how he was behaving and stuff. And now, suddenly, I was turning him over to someone we had never met. But I was grateful! (The year before he went to kindergarten was hard--he was 4, his little brother was 2, I was pregnant. Rough year.) It was a great first year of school for all of us.
But honestly, my memories of kindergarten and most of elementary school are kind of fuzzy and rosy. High school is a much sharper and closer memory for me. (Even though it's been exactly 20 years since my senior year of high school started!) I remember a lot from high school, good, bad and ugly, and now I have a son who is embarking on that journey. High school is when I started to figure out who I was, find things I loved to learn about, find things I was good at, find things I was not good at, find that people's choices can be hurtful. And I know I felt pretty capable as a teenager in some ways, and he does too, which is hard to remember when I look at him and see the toddler inside the young man he is turning into.
I keep thinking about my kids' getting older and more independent, and what it does to me as a mom, how I respond to that. I remember my mom remarking, often, how much she enjoyed us kids when we were teenagers because she could reason with us and we were fun to talk to. I'm finding the same thing happening to me. I think I laugh more now with my teenager and preteen, in the same way that I would laugh with my siblings when we were young and under the same roof, than I did when my kids were all really small. And I think it surprises them that I a) have a sense of humor and b) have the same sense of humor as they have. We laugh at a lot of the same things.
