The Universe or God of Heat Waves must be smiling on me. I’m
not ready for Finn’s senior year. I’m taking the school cancellation as a
reprieve to collect myself. I’ve been in denial. Well not really, but I have
been stuffing emotions like a chipmunk until this evening when at a stop light
the dam broke and I burst into tears as Donna Summer sang McArthur Park on
Sirius 70s on 7. (Don’t judge.)
Something about the cake in the rain and never having the
recipe again pierced me to the core even though I never baked a cake in my
life. I do eat them and I am pretty sure I don’t even know what that song is about
but
this
is no time for metaphors.
My outburst happened before I knew school was cancelled. The
same school I thought started Wednesday not Tuesday. The miscalculation left me
running around erratically cleaning, going to Staples and otherwise
pleading with my boys to organize their rooms because… SCHOOL WAS STARTING!
Anyway, I digress. This senior thing is hard; it’s happy and
exciting and - sorry folks, pretty much worse than Kindergarten drop off.
I keep going back in my head to this woman I worked with 11
years ago. Finn was in Kindergarten and Dylan still working his way out of
diapers. Every time I met her for a meeting at her desk she’d ask how the boys
were and click her tongue, shake her head and say, “It’s going to go by sooooo fast.” My indoor voice would say,
‘Lady I just graduated from not coming to
work with spit-up on my sweater to the handprint on boobs and backside stage and
I probably won’t wear white pants for the next decade so can I JUST ENJOY THEM.’
In real life, I smiled and seethed in the same way you do
when the total stranger touches your pregnant belly in the checkout of
Stop&Shop. I’m not totally sure why work lady bothered me so. I suppose if
I still worked with her I would have to grudgingly tell her she was right.
Wasn’t I just chasing Buzz Lightyear through the house?
Running around every school morning with one shoe on looking for my work badge
that Dylan hid in his toy box while shrieking we’re late for school, only to
find Finn six feet up in the air in the front-yard tree waiting for me.
As someone who writes messages about change and transition for
a living, I am not sure how I missed the transformation before we got here.
There were visible signs after all, like
“Hey mom, you’re so short you could be my arm rest,” or when I would come home
and not recognize the 6’3, 250 pound man in the distance walking the dog and
think, “Who the hell is walking Snowball?…oh, it’s Finn.”
The truth is, I have loved every beautiful, messy stage we
have moved though together and I am looking forward to next steps. The things
we do together as mom and son have evolved of course. I don’t have to get him
off to school anymore; I do have to wait up for him and worry. We don’t watch
Disney Channel anymore but I do get Twitter DMs featuring, SNL, Jimmy Fallon or
some outlandish Trump tweet and I relish them.
And now that I’ve had time to think and he is not a senior
in my mind until this Thursday, I’ve embraced the change. This year is another
beginning – a time for big decisions and new choices – a time to fly solo and
let go. I know he knows I’ll be cheering the loudest from the sidelines.
Ready or not, here we go!
