My older son is an adult.
(Rinse, repeat.)
No, no, no!–it can’t be!–
To give me credit, I’m not utterly blown away by this because it smacks me upside the head with my own advancing age and/or mortality. I still feel like a teenaged twit half the time, probably because I specialize in having an unsettled life. No, that’s not it–
He became a legal adult a few months ago, but it didn’t really hit me then. He sure didn’t look any different the day after his eighteenth birthday. A few months before that, he’d acquired his first real girlfriend, and navigating those waters (specifically, those sexually active waters) was a bit stressful, but not that big a deal. Well, not after I acquired some comfort level about his contraceptive responsibility, anyway.
His high school graduation ceremony approacheth! Nope, that still didn’t send me over the edge…I’m actually looking forward to it, except for the part where I have to hang out with my ex-mother-in-law. I haven’t even seen the woman since 1998. While I was divorcing my sons’ dad, one of the few comforting realizations I had in conjunction with that whole mess was that I was never, ever going to have to deal with her again. (The currently-high-school-graduating culprit was only eight years old at the time his father and I were separating, so I must’ve blocked this eventuality out.) Gah. How do you talk to your ex-mother-in-law, the one who probably threw a party when you vacated her son’s life ten years ago..? Maybe I can come up with a strategic need to go to the bathroom if it looks like we have to stand within ten feet of each other at any point.
No, what really did it was finding out he’s considering enlisting the Air Force. As in, he’s already talked to a recruiter. Twice. This week! Now, if he is going to enlist, the Air Force is definitely the place to do it–buncha wusses, hardly any Iraq or Afghanistan casualties, lots of technical training schools–but still. Eeek!
The worst part about the whole thing is this:
I have officially run out of chances to raise him right.
Yep, I have. Whatever I’ve done over the past eighteen years, that’s it. No going back. No redos. No changing my whole strategy of childrearing. No getting to be a better mom. The mom I was is now the mom that I will always have been. And I’m really, really afraid I didn’t do a good enough job.
I must go wallow now in my combined feelings of guilt and impending doom…be back later.
I figure that most of the work (if not all) of raising a kid is done by the time they’re twelve. Then they stick around for a few years with a safety net.
Then, allofasudden! they take hold of their own controls and they’re gone! Although they visit from time to time.