Well, maybe not yet, but he’s definitely perched on the edge, wings aspread, surveying the vast new world before him.
My son graduates high school tomorrow. We’re having a houseful of people over tomorrow…the little ones will have to sit in laps. It’s a small graduating class, only about 80 kids.
I have a whole long “remembrance” post in mnd, but I’ll hold onto that one until we’re ready to drop him off at college. In about three months. :eek:
His sister is only three years behind him. :eek: :eek:
Those of you with toddlers…I’m warning you…they’ll be gone before you know it.
You would think since it’s a small graduating class (67 seniors) that the ceremony would be quick.
Nope.
We had singing, we had invocations, we had awards, we had prizes, we had recognizing the senior SGA and welcoming in the new senior SGA, we had recognizing the prefects and welcoming in the new prefects, we had more singing. Two flipping hours before they handed out the diplomas. :smack:
Ah well, Ivyboy walked across the stage, got his diploma, and much whooping and hollering ensued. Then we all came home and had a nice time with the extended family.
He’s “free” for the summer…except that getting a license thing, getting a job thing, and filling out scholarship application thing.
Our youngest graduated High School this past Monday. It is truly amazing to realize all the years of homework, choir concerts, cookies for class parties, etc. etc. is finally over for me.
Congrats to Ivylad… seems my own high school graduation wasn’t that long ago, but it kind of hit me this week that next year will be ten years since I graduated! Of course, here in Quebec that means grade 11, and then there were the two years of general college before university, but still…ten years!!
If it makes you feel any better, both my brother and my sister have come back to live at my parent’s place after being away for a while… us kids never truly leave! In fact, I’m even posting from my parent’s computer… though I’m only here overnight
And then they run off to college and you hardly see them.
My daughter graduated last year, and is in college now. She attends an art school, and can go straight through the summer, which she has elected to do, so she isn’t coming home for the summer break. It’s a little odd, with her not being around, but she loves it.
She has a job and is suddenly so responsible. She gets good grades and when she calls home she just jabbers on and on about how much she loves school and her job and her roommates and everything. We went through a little bit of a rough time with her in the early high school years and she’s really turned things around. I’m very proud of her.
Oh, and she got her nose pierced. :eek:
And congrats to your son, Ivylass. His success reflects on you.
Warn him that the next four years of his life will pass by far too quickly. I just graduated with my undergrad degree about a month ago and can’t believe that part of my life is over. My sister’s advice to me going into college was that it would be the time period that I would most likely remember as “the good ol’ days” and to treat it as such. Make it a time that I can be proud of, but still have great stories to recount when I’m old and gray. I’m obviously not yet old enough to know if her advice was true, but I’m glad I treated it as if it were.
As for you, congratulations! From the various bits and pieces you’ve written about him, it sounds like you’ve done a lot right.
I think he’s a pretty good kid…but then I’m a bit biased.
We went out with some family of my step-mom’s today…nice picnic BBQ out at the lake. Ivyboy zeroed in on a sweet young thing and spent most of the afternoon chatting her up.
I, of course, had to sit back and bite my tongue. He’s still a bit young though…later on, when her cousin came off and they wandered off to make some cell phone calls he got a bit miffed and ignored her for a bit, then when she came back, he completely missed her signal that she wanted him to kiss her good bye. His father was the one who pointed it out to him.
I then reminded him that he doesn’t have to act on every signal a girl sends him, to which his father agreed.
Oh Og…there’s only three more months to hammer home these lessons, then he’s out there on his own!!
My niece is graduating HS this June, and I can’t afford to fly to Georgia for her graduation. I still remember when she and her sis were babies… (going off to cry)
Mine has been out of the house for two years, and I still worry about him. I don’t think that will ever change! He only lives five minutes from me, and still I hardly ever see him.
I don’t actively worry about him, though. It’s more like passing thoughts now. Time will help.
I’ve cared and taken care of him for nearly 18 years. Now I get to shut it off like a light switch?
I’m trying, I really am, and Ivylad laughs at me. I’m supposed to trust this kid who can’t keep his room clean to go out on his own and take care of himself, his education, and his job?
My dad said once you give your kids roots, then you give them wings. I can only hope he’s got a good root system.
Well, you did fine. Didn’t ya? I suspect Ivylad has been picking up on your knowledge for those 18 years. I think he’ll be just fine.
Our oldest has been on her own for a couple of years now. It was hard at first to walk past her empty bedroom (snif) but at the same time I was so impressed with her ability to run her own life. It’s fun to meet her for lunch - it reminds me of those times I used to meet my Mom for lunch. To me it’s a lot like other milestones - first steps, going off to kindergarten, etc. Each time I think that I can’t bear it - but then I work through it, life shifts gears, and off we go again.
Well, first of all, if you raised 'em right, it’s not a question of you standing back, of “letting them go”. It’s more a question of getting out of the way of a runaway freight train, because they will go when they’re ready, and they’re always ready way before you are.
I have spent considerable amount of time thinking about this the last couple of years. The Cat Who Walks Alone got married and moved up to Chicago two years ago this month, and I’ll tell ya, it still leaves a hole. I still have the feeling that our family is “broken” somehow; there is someone who is supposed to be there who isn’t there–but when I look at her, up there in Chicago, going to college, happily married, working hard, she’s doing just fine. She didn’t “run away”; she wasn’t fleeing a dysfunctional home situation, or “getting out” because she couldn’t stand it anymore, or because she had unrealistic expectations of making it in the entertainment industry or something similar, and is toiling away in humiliation and poverty, living on dreams.
No, it was just that she was 20 years old, 3 months short of her 21st birthday in fact, and she and her high school best friend were deeply in love, and the both of them had big plans for their lives, and it was just…time. Time to go. She was “done”.
If she hadn’t left, I would have actually been a failure as a mother, because the whole point of raising your children is to enable them to be strong enough to leave you when they’re “done”, when they’re grown. In current society, we look askance at twenty- and even thirty-somethings who still live with their parents, feeling that there’s something fundamentally weird and not-right there.
So, I did my job, and she left. And I tell myself that that was a Good Thing, even though, as I said, it left a big hole, and it still hurts not to have her “home” with me. And I suppose that’s normal, too, because when you spend years being personally responsible for another human being’s survival 24/7/365, even if that other human being is finally 20 years old and went out and got her own health insurance plan, it’s hard to stop being that person on whom all the burden of all that ultimate adult responsibility-ness devolves.
The next youngest is Bonzo, who just finished his sophomore year at college, and is now home for the summer. But somehow it wasn’t a wrench, having him gone off and on for the last two years, because he still comes (watch this word here)…“home”. He may be away at college, but this is still “Home”. He won’t have really left until he’s out of college and has moved all his junque out of my house and into “his” house somewhere, even if it’s only an apartment.
And I’m assuming that your son going off will be like that–you’ll miss him, the way you’d miss him if he went off to summer camp, but he’ll still come “home”, and he won’t really have “left” in your mind until his bedroom is empty of his things.
The youngest is La Principessa, who will be a senior in high school next year. Now, when she goes off to college, that’s going to be a wrench, and a shock, because she has always been the baby, not only in the sense of being the youngest, but also she has always been the small and petite one, the one who always needed to be on Mommy’s lap, and she is the one who is visibly chafing at the bit to be “away” somewhere; the other two were much more laid-back about it. She is the one who I see going off to college and basically never coming back, and I don’t like to think about that.
But, again, I have to come back to, if I hadn’t raised her right, she wouldn’t want to go, and that would be a Bad Thing.
So you don’t “let go”; you get out of their way. You can console yourself, as they take themselves off, that the mere fact that they are able to leave you means that you did a good job.
Yeah, that’s the expectation here. I couldn’t do it, either. At the wedding, I cried and cried. And at the point where the minister was asking them, “Do you…” I found myself thinking, “Say no. Say no, and come home.” And then I hated myself, because that would have been truly an Evil Thing, for her to turn her back on her best friend, who is a lovely young man, and all his truly very nice family, and have her decide to–what?–come home with me? That would have been…sick.
[Somewhat parenthetically…after the wedding reception, Bonzo was going to drive me home, and I couldn’t help noticing that my bumptious and just a tad insensitive 18-year-old was oddly tender and considerate with me. And I realized that maybe he saw his mom cry and cry at his sister’s wedding, and maybe he suddenly saw me as a person, and not just as a Mom. Sometimes they grow up slow and steady, and sometimes they grow up in fits and starts.]
Many months later I ran across a quote in a novel by Willa Cather, in My Antonia, which I found somewhat comforting, because I couldn’t understand why I was still grieving, when all that happened was that my daughter got married, happens all the time. The woman is talking about the day her daughter got married, and she says, “I cried like I was putting her into her coffin.”
I went and showed the Better Half that quote. “See? That’s exactly how I feel. Other women feel this way, too.”
Guys sometimes don’t get it. Doesn’t make him a bad guy, just a guy who doesn’t get it. And he’s certainly harking back to his own adolescence and the “moving out” rite of passage. He sees it as a grand opportunity for Ivyboy, and it wouldn’t have occurred to him 20-odd years ago that his mother might be grieving when he left.
Well…yeah. I’d match Bonzo up against Ivyboy any day in the Messiest Room In The Galaxy contest, but yeah, the general idea is that if you raised him right, he’s supposed to want to irritably grab the reins out of your hands and drive the buggy himself. If he were content to sit there and let you do the driving, there’d be something wrong with him.
And you’ll be comforted to know, as I was, that adolescent males can apparently run on nothing but Pepsi and pizza, and still not come down with beri-beri or scurvy. It’s some kind of testosterone-fueled vitamin reserve, that enables them to slide through till about age 20, when they finally realize that they’re getting awful tired of pizza, and switch to Chinese takeout, which at least has vegetables in it.
And since Bonzo is leasing an apartment for next year along with three friends, he was actually interested when I offered to demonstrate how to cook Shake N Bake Chicken, especially when I pointed out how much cheaper it is to buy your own ingredients and cook at home. Next lesson: how to fry Spam.
And as far as education and job choices, that’s never been something that any of my three would allow the parental units much input into, at all. Which, again, shows that we did our job right.
And Bonzo spent the last two years figuring out that if he doesn’t do the work, then he doesn’t get the grades. And that if he allocates too much time to God of War, then he’s not getting the work done, and he’s not getting the grades. And that if he doesn’t set the alarm clock before he goes to sleep, he’ll be late for work.
And that’s not something that I could do for him anyway–time management is one of those adult lessons that can only be learned once you’re away from Mom and her instinct to holler up the stairs, “AREN’T YOU SUPPOSED TO BE SOMEWHERE THIS MORNING?”
So Ivyboy will figure it out eventually. And yeah, he may flunk a class or two, but that’s how it goes. You can’t intervene and “fix” it for him anymore. He’s gotta figure it out for himself, how it works, how this “Adult Life” thing works, or else end up at age 50-something, like my brother-in-law, with a completely formless, directionless life. Which would be an Evil Thing. And the only way Ivyboy is gonna learn that “how to be a functioning adult” lesson is if he’s away from where his mom and dad can fix everything.
Of course, you’ll still be called upon to help fix things, big things that are beyond Ivyboy’s skill level. Bonzo got a letter last January from the Housing Office saying that since he was on the Academic Drop list (!), he no longer had a dorm room, come get your stuff. He sat there in the dining room and wept with chagrin; his advisor had TOLD him, just before Christmas, that his grades were dangerously low, and suggested that he Take Steps. Which he did not do. With the result that Housing cancelled his contract.
So he was all, sorrowfully, “I guess I’ll have to go to Parkland or Richland or something”, but the Better Half said, “No, let’s go over there and talk to them.” So, long story short, the older and wiser head was correct, there were Procedures that could be followed, people to be talked to, and Bonzo ended up back in college, and the dorm, for the semester after all. End of crisis.
Just because Ivyboy is out of the house doesn’t mean he’ll never need you again, just that the things he’ll need you for will be…different. He won’t need you to wash his socks, but he will need you to, occasionally, give him a tactful word of advice, and sometimes bail him out of a jam.
I’ve noticed that the older my two older kids get, the more respectfully they listen when I offer advice. La Principessa is still at the Prickly Teen stage, but both The Cat and Bonzo are much politer. Maybe that’s just a function of adulthood, I dunno.
Speaking of washing socks, here is a true story.
When I dropped Bonzo off at college for his freshman year, I noticed that the guy across the hall had a Mom who was unpacking ALL his stuff for him. “Now, the fan goes here, and the lamp goes here…”
“Wow, that’s weird,” I thought. I took one last look at Bonzo’s pile of junque which we had toted up the stairs, said to him, “Welp, guess I’ll see you at Thanksgiving, huh?” and split.
So three days later he sent us this in an e-mail:
And then a week later, we got this:
It’s moments like this that you live for as a Mom.
Well, see, that’s what I’m sayin’, that if he didn’t want to go, you’d know you’d missed something, somewhere.
And I will add that Bonzo is still incorrigibly into gaming rather than girls, so his dad hasn’t had to have The Talk with him. If Ivyboy is as into girls as you say, make sure he gets the words-of-one-syllable “If you make a baby, then it’s YOUR baby, and your parental units expect you to put your life on hold and help raise it for the next 18 years, so use a condom” talk before he leaves.
And tell him not to get Planned Parenthood condoms–Consumer Reports tested condoms and found those to be substandard in terms of break strength, but that all other commercial brands were identical, and “passed”.
I graduate in 19 days. But I’m the fourth, and my parents will be living essentially an hour away (they’re moving to Harrisonburg, which is 60 miles from Blacksburg, which is where I’m going in a few months).
