The view from the passenger seat

I am not fond of driving. Not at all. I’ve often said that the singular drawback to living in Carlisle is all the time we spend driving places. Whether it’s for work, school, socializing, recreation, dining, or culture, we seem to be forever taking up a position behind the wheel.

Still, I never expected I’d have my own driver. I don’t even have regular cleaning help; the idea of someone to drive me around on errands or appointments was well beyond my imagining.

And yet that’s just the situation I’m in right now. My son Tim is in that narrow six-month time frame between receiving his learner’s permit and earning his driver’s license, an interlude in which the rules stipulate both that he must gain as much driving experience as possible and that he must do so under the watchful eye of a licensed and experienced driver.

So these days, Tim drives. He drives me to the supermarket and the drugstore, the post office and the library. He drives when we visit my parents. He drives when we drop off or pick up his younger sister from school or playdates. After three full decades of driving myself around, I now have someone whose assignment, and indeed whose pleasure, it is to drive me places.

This is not a developmental phase of childhood that I foresaw. I assumed Tim would want to learn to drive eventually, but as that benchmark loomed, I saw it mostly as a source of anxiety. How would I teach him the rules of the road? How would I explain how much room to give a car when passing, or what the perfect angle was for parallel parking?

But rather than being anxious, as I expected, I’m enjoying Tim’s company along with his chauffeuring services. He stopped wanting to join me for grocery shopping or other random errands at least ten years ago; given the choice, he would always opt to stay home. It’s fun spending more time together again. Moreover, it’s fun merely to see his enthusiastic response when I ask if he wants to go somewhere with me, even if I know that in truth his enthusiasm is more about the driving practice than about my company.

It’s not a time for intense mother-son dialogue. I don’t bring up college choices, or current events, or the moral and ethical dilemmas that teenagers typically face. He’s supposed to be concentrating on the road. But in a way, that’s what makes it so peaceful. It’s just the two of us, spending time close together without an agenda to cover or decisions to contemplate. It reminds me a little bit of the hours I spent roaming the neighborhood with him in a jog stroller or baby backpack when he was an infant. I was never one of those mothers who chatters nonstop to her small children. On those long, quiet walks or runs, it was all about the proximity, not the discourse.

So many developmental phases with children and teens are about growing apart, letting them finding their independence, allowing them to forge their own way. This period of driving together is one milestone that brings us closer together, even if more by regulation than by Tim’s choice. It’s a brief, tightly circumscribed interlude: only six months altogether, if he earns his license on the first try, and half of that time is already gone.

So I’ll just enjoy my chauffeur until the day he turns sixteen and a half. It’s nice to be driven around, and knowing it won’t last much longer, I’ll savor it all the more. He’ll eventually get his license, and then he’ll drive on his own, just as someday he will probably live on his own and spend even less time with me. For now, I’ll take all the time together that I can get. To me, it’s quality time, even if as far is Tim is concerned, all we’re doing is following the rules of the road.

Learner's permit

My son Tim turned sixteen yesterday, and like at least two generations of suburban American kids before him, he celebrated the day with a trip to the Registry of Motor Vehicles for his learner's permit.

For the most part, I was pleased by his sense of urgency. Childhood, and even more so the teen years, have far too few rites of passage these days. With all the material goods and all the travel opportunities that so many privileged young people have access to, sometimes it's not clear to me what they have left to anticipate. I look at the teens I know locally who live in McMansions with swimming pools, billiards rooms, in-house movie theaters and vacation houses at the beach and wonder if they have any incentive at all to grow up and leave home. Do you yearn for your own little bachelor pad if your parents’ place has an in-house gym with a full basketball court?

So it feels right to me that there's something special and rare about turning sixteen, something cool and exciting that you get to do merely by reaching a birthday. But it’s not the de facto milestone that it once was. Articles I've read recently have supported what I've personally observed; when my generation were teens, we all wanted to drive, but now, with their overscheduled lives and their helicopter parents who are accustomed to driving them to every activity, some kids don't really care all that much about getting a license.

And it makes sense, in a way. Being able to drive yourself to SAT preparation class, math tutoring, or mandatory community service hours doesn't have quite the same allure as being able to take the wheel and go cruising with your friends on the strip. Moreover, new regulations that restrict whom teen drivers can take as passengers mean any possibility of cruising the strip -- wherever that strip may be, in our quiet semi-rural town -- still feels years away to a sixteen-year-old.

Tim returned from the RMV triumphant, permit in hand. It's definitely a rite of passage, and one he was delighted to undergo. I greeted his news with a little bit of ambivalence. First and foremost, there are the obvious worries about safety -- his own and those of other people with he could potentially collide -- but there's also the subtler sense that if he can drive, he's taking his first steps into not only the excitement and independence of adulthood but ultimately the drudgery as well. Welcome to errands. And having to be places on time. And dealing with car maintenance. And paying for gas.

But he's looking forward to it. He’s had plenty of opportunities to pilot various vehicles while working on his grandparents' farm; during the summer months he drove cars, trucks and tractors all over the fields and private byways on the farm. He knows the excitement of powering a large piece of machinery. Moreover, he's been driving a motorboat since he was about ten, and like a lot of kids, he just likes engines and speed and what happens when you get the chance to combine the two.

So I wish him all the best as he ventures behind the wheel. And I wish my husband all the best as well, because that's who will be overseeing Tim's driving instruction in these early days. I'll wait until he's a little more capable. Then I'll give him some errands to do. Because with freedom comes responsibility, and I'll be more than happy to pass on a few of my weekly trips to the town dump. Maybe that can be considered a rite of passage as well.

A beautiful evening for baseball

Sunday was a beautiful evening for watching a baseball game.

Except that I wasn't really thinking about watching a baseball game, despite the fact that I had driven 25 minutes to reach the field, and toted along a fold-up chair, hats for my daughter Holly and me, salad and strawberries to contribute to a picnic, and a picnic blanket.

I was thinking about how I'd managed to vacuum only half the house. I was thinking about what time I'd need to get Holly to day camp the next morning and whether the schedule would enable me to reach my office on time. I was thinking about why the washing machine had mysteriously turned itself off in the middle of a rinse cycle, and when I could be home for a service visit if the washing machine didn't resuscitate itself in the morning. I was thinking about how many more games were left before Tim's summer league ended, and whether I'd submitted all the paperwork in order for him to start driver's ed next week. And I was thinking, as I always do during baseball games, about whether any of us in the stands or whether any of the players on the field were likely to get beaned by a fastball and sustain a brain-threatening injury.

And just as it looked like a win was within easy reach, the other team tied the game and it went into extra innings.

All of which almost made me overlook the fact that it was such a beautiful evening for a baseball game.

By 6:30, the edges of the field were bathed in shade. My parents had arrived earlier and claimed a wide swath of grass for our picnic. I'd taken time at home to hull the strawberries, and they were tender, sweet, and room temperature, just the way I like them best. Holly was excited about the start of camp. Tim was pitching with an air of assurance, whether merited or not.

It was the last weekend of June, and the whole summer still lay ahead....and yet as I watched the extra innings begin, in hopes of a prompt and easy tie-breaker, I realized the sense of limitless time was an illusion. The baseball season would indeed end, but more changes would follow. Holly would soon be old enough to make her own plans on a summer evening, plans which very likely would not include her brother's baseball games. By the time a new baseball season rolls around, Tim will be able to drive himself to the field. My parents won't be here to picnic with us forever either.

It's strange to have a sense of things ending just as the summer is beginning, but sitting there watching the game made me ever more aware of how much that game was like my life itself. So many details to keep track of -- details involving household maintenance, employment, health, finances -- but also so much to enjoy. And, too, so much to worry about: an errant pitch slamming into an eye or skull and changing everything; a bad decision about which side street to take on the way home.

Life is short, I reminded myself as the game entered yet another tied inning. Summer is short. The baseball season is short. Even the strawberry season is short. This abundance of blessings -- family, food, health, security -- all of this could, and in some ways inevitably will, pass.

There were still a couple of tied innings left for me to savor, and I stopped thinking about the malfunctioning washing machine and upcoming deadlines and paid attention to baseball. Tim's team lost, but that didn’t matter. We had a wonderful time. It turned out to be not only a beautiful evening but a perfect one.

Back to school - but not all that often, anymore

I had a mid-afternoon meeting at the kids’ school yesterday.

Except it’s not even the kids’ school anymore. I just say that from habit. It’s Holly’s school now; Tim has already been gone for nearly a year. His school is eight miles away, on a campus on which I still have to ask for directions to get anywhere except the main office or the auditorium.

But most of the time directions aren’t required because most of the time I’m not there, trying to find anything. Parents aren’t particularly needed on a high school campus; the administration and students together manage to pretty much run the show without us.

And it seems parents are needed a lot less at the lower school these days as well, although I know that’s not really true. From my friends with kids in the early elementary grades, I know that parents are still checking in and out of the office all day long to volunteer in the school library or run lines for the kindergarten play or chaperone a field trip to Boston.

But Holly is in middle school now, and even though it’s the same campus as the elementary school, my days as a weekly if not daily presence there are over.

So sitting in the brand-new conference room in the building that didn’t even exist when Holly was a grade schooler felt both familiar and strange to me yesterday afternoon. Watching the kindergarteners pass by outside the windows in a jagged line, some holding hands, some skipping, some distractedly shuffling, reminded me of every time I’d ever craned for a peek at my own kids’ classes passing by outside the window while I pretended to pay attention to a parent presentation or sorted book orders as a room parent. Except that if this were either of my kids’ kindergarten classes, I would have recognized every single kid. On this day, I recognized none of them at all. I didn’t even know why they were all wearing matching, neon green t-shirts.

Maybe they had a classroom performance, I thought, realizing only later when I drove past the baseball field and saw the bounce house that it was Field Day. That’s another event to which parents of younger kids flock, to deliver popsicles and take pictures and cheer on their little long-jumpers and three-legged-racers. Holly has middle school field day on Wednesday, but I wouldn’t have even known that if I hadn’t seen it in the school newsletter. At her age, it’s no longer a big event for parents.

All of this is making me sound more wistful than I really feel. Helping out at school was fun, most of the time, but it took up a lot of hours, and there were interpersonal politics involved, and sometimes a little guilt as far as who was doing too much and who wasn’t doing enough. Both kids are past the phase where parents are a big part of classroom life, and I welcome the new independence that comes with these new phases.

At the same time, in two years, Holly will be graduating from our local public school and I’ll have no call to be on that campus at all ever, except when the auditorium is being used for municipal purposes such as Town Meeting. Maybe then I’ll remember the days of classroom volunteering and feel more wistful than I do now. Right now, I still can’t imagine not being a school parent in our town; it’s been part of my identity for ten years.

To every thing there is a season. Now it’s nearly summer and school will soon be over, but Holly – and I – expect to be back on campus in the fall, to varying degrees. In another two years, Holly will cross town lines to the regional high school, and this campus will be mostly just a memory for me.

And that will be okay too. If I really need a fix of elementary school life, I can always take a seat in the back of the auditorium for one more mitten play or go watch the three-legged races at Field Day. But I probably shouldn’t. New parents will have taken my place. And that’s just as it should be.

Finding confidence

I was certain I didn't have the mechanical skills, the spatial relations, or the brute strength to install the bike rack on the car.

That's a Rick-job, I told myself. He's good at these endeavors. He's good at making things and fixing things. He's capable with mechanical systems and manual labor. If I do it, the bike rack will tumble off as soon as I start driving. Not only that, but the bikes we attach to it will fall into the street. I'll lose my bike rack and our bikes, and I'll humiliate myself in front of other drivers, but worst of all, I could cause a serious accident to someone behind me.

Nope, not my kind of thing. We all know what we're good at. I can write and cook and interview people. But attach a bike rack to a car and feel confident it will stay there? No way. That's the kind of thing I turn to Rick for.

Except that Rick was at work for the day, and Tim and I were home for the Monday holiday, and both of us thought it would really be great if we could get our bikes in for maintenance on this first warm sunny spring day so that the next time we have weather this beautiful and a day off, we can go for a ride.

And Tim had none of my qualms. Like most teenage boys, he's pretty confident in his ability to master the physical world, rightly or wrongly. In just the past few weeks, he has proven himself able to throw a change-up pitch and execute a three-point turn in the driveway. On Easter, shortly before dinner was served, he nonchalantly picked me up and carried me across the kitchen.

So he didn't really see why we couldn't go ahead and install the bike rack ourselves. "Because it won't stay on," I told him. "Because it's complicated. Because we won't be able to tell if we attached it correctly or not."

But Tim disagreed. "Let's just do it," he grumbled. "It will be fine."

He lifted it onto the car; I connected the belts. He tightened the cinches; I fastened the clips.

Together, we lifted the two bikes onto the rack.

Nothing fell. I tugged and shifted its various parts to see what would happen. It held fast.

"See, Mom," Tim sighed. "It wasn't that hard."

I wasn't convinced, but Tim suggested we drive down the driveway and see. Our driveway is long and somewhat pothole-ridden; it seemed like a reasonable test. At the end of the driveway, rack and bikes were still intact.

So we drove to the bike repair shop. I somehow expected more credit. "How did you get these bikes here?" I expected the bike technician to ask. "You know how to install a bike rack yourself?"

Needless to say, no marveling at our aptitude was forthcoming on his part. His job is to help people with their bikes, not to wonder how they got there. If he was happy to see me, it was because we represented new business, not because it meant I'd overcome years of assumptions that I wasn't capable of a task like this without Rick's oversight.

When I got home, I registered for my first half-marathon, something I've been vacillating on for months. I want to do it, but some days I think I can and other days I think I can't, and I didn't want to register until I was sure.

But Tim set a good example yesterday. Although there are few apparent similarities between installing a bike rack and running a half-marathon, it was Tim's confidence that stayed with me once we'd dropped off the bikes and been assured that the leaky tires would be replaced within a day or two. "We can do it ourselves, Mom," he had said. Tim wasn't amazed to think we could do this without Rick; he was slightly dismayed by my belief we couldn't. I'm not sure I can run a half-marathon. But I might as well tell myself I can, just as Tim did with the bike rack. I'll try it and find out.

Learning from one's children is always an interesting experience. In most ways, I don't particularly want to act like a 15-year-old boy. But this time it served me well. "Sure, I can probably do this," I told myself as I clicked the “pay now” button on the registration site for the half-marathon. It's still three months away, but I think I can do it. And if I'm right, I'll have Tim to credit for my confidence.

Friendships that flourish, thanks to our kids

Sunday was Tim's birthday. On his first birthday, I think I received as many congratulatory notes as he did, but now that he's fifteen, less of a deal is made even among other moms about the "mom-birthday." This year I heard from just one mom wishing me a happy Tim's-birthday. It was the mother who shared a hospital room with me during the two-day stay after Tim was born.

Later that day, I visited with a friend I hadn't seen in a while. Well, really only a few weeks, but it was that critical first-few-weeks-of-school, and we had a lot to catch up on: how high school was going so far for her son and for mine; a landscaping project she had tackled Labor Day weekend; what was new at her workplace. We became friends after our sons bonded in a fourth grade reading circle.

Last week I worked on a feature story about apple picking. Fishing around for a clever lead, I put the word out to a circle of contacts that I needed an apple-picking anecdote. The first person I heard back from was a mom I met in the mother-baby group that Tim and I started attending when he was three weeks old.

It all reminded me of how many friends of my own have come to me through my children: from the woman I shared a hospital room with through those mother-infant groups and into preschool and elementary school, from friendships forged while watching our kids play baseball to friendships forged over school volunteer projects.

When our children are born, it's fun to imagine them having friends of their own someday, but I don't think I realized how much of an effect Tim would eventually have on my own social life. His friends' parents are our friends. So are the parents of his teammates and classmates. We've met people we never would have crossed paths with if our kids hadn't enjoyed hanging out together.

This wasn't something I expected as a perk of parenthood. I thought I had enough friends earlier in adulthood, before kids were part of the picture. But I'm so grateful for all the new faces the kids have indirectly brought to our circle. It's a benefit of parenthood I didn't anticipate.

Later in the evening, during Tim's birthday party, I took a picture of him and his three guests. Then I emailed it to each of the kids' mothers. They all wrote back within the hour to thank me.

It was a picture of kids celebrating Tim's birthday. But to me, there was a subtext to the photo as well. It was a celebration of my own friendships: some of the ones I'm most grateful to have, and friendships I wouldn't have without Tim.

A new school means a clean slate -- for me!

I expected that my predominant emotion when I drove up to Concord-Carlisle Regional High School to drop Tim off the first time would be apprehension.

Instead, to my surprise, it was liberation.

I didn’t know this place, true, and that was unnerving. But the up side to being a stranger suddenly became obvious: I didn’t have any pre-existing commitments here. I wouldn’t be likely to recognize people if I were to walk into one of the buildings on campus. I didn’t have any projects under way that needed attention.

All of this may sound more like I’m the one going off to high school rather than Tim, but I’m afraid after nine years as a parent volunteer at my kids’ school, this is how I think. At our local K-8 school, from which Tim graduated last June and Holly just started sixth grade, the campus is full of reminders of tasks I’ve undertaken. Seeing the school library reminds me that I’m in charge of scheduling volunteers once again this year. The lunchroom reminds me that I need to make a vegetarian entrée for next week’s teacher appreciation luncheon. The playground reminds me that it’s time to sign up for recess duty. The familiar faces of staff and other parents remind me of dozens of pre-existing relationships that I try hard to maintain.

At CCHS, I have none of those associations. Last summer, a woman in her eighties whom I was interviewing for a memoir project told me about what it was like when she moved from a suburban community where she’d raised her family to an apartment on Beacon Hill. “It was wonderful,” she said. “I didn’t owe anyone anything. I hadn’t served on their committees and they hadn’t served on mine.”

For some reason, her turn of phrase amused me. It doesn’t exactly have the poetic eloquence of an ancient Native American proverb, but those words were echoing in my mind as I dropped Tim off for school: “I haven’t served on their committees and they haven’t served on mine.” It’s impossible to go through nine years at our local school without taking on myriad tasks and responsibilities as a parent volunteer. Most of the time, they’re a lot of fun; it’s wonderful to have the opportunity to get involved in so many child-related events and projects.

But the high school gives me the irresistible sense of a clean slate. I don’t know the reputations of Tim’s teachers or the distance between his classrooms. I don’t have opinions about his schedule. I don’t know anything about any of it, and best of all, I’m not on any committees yet. I have yet to make a single misstep as a parent here.

The time will come, no doubt: for committee work and for missteps as well as for good memories of presentations, student productions, football games. There are new people to meet and there will eventually be new tasks to undertake; I don’t know of a single school, public or private, that doesn’t draw heavily on parental participation these days. But so far I haven’t taken on a thing. And so instead of the expected feeling of strangeness, I approach this new phase with a sense of relief.

Off to high school

I started worrying about this day almost exactly two years ago. Tim was starting seventh grade. He was entrenched in middle school: one year down, one under way, and one more to complete. There was no question by that time that high school lay dead ahead.

And the mere thought of that sparked dozens of questions in my mind: questions with which I peppered my many friends who have older children for the two years that followed. "How will I know if Tim is registered for high school?" "Who decides what classes he should take?" "What time does the bus come?" "How does he sign up for afterschool sports?" "What's the dress code?" "What will he need for school supplies?" And so on, and so on -- throughout the past 23 months and well into this past August.

The problem was that I found myself at an unexpected disadvantage when it came to sending Tim off to high school. Since my children are growing up in the same town in which I was raised, ever since kindergarten, Tim has attended the same school I attended. This year, ninth grade, will be the first time I've ever sent him off to a school where I don’t already know the smell of the hallways, the sound of the between-class shuffle, the feel of the humid food-tinged air in the lunchroom, the location of every lavatory. Since he's going to the public high school and I attended a private school, I know almost nothing about the institution he's about to enter. In fact, after two weeks of pre-season football training, he's already spent more time on the high school campus than I have in my entire lifetime thus far.

But ironically, looking back now to when he started kindergarten, I realize the sense of familiarity I had back then was actually somewhat falsely rooted. My belief that I knew the school inside and out turned out to be misguided. I would discover in the course of the weeks and months that followed that the kindergarten classrooms had moved. The cafeteria had been rebuilt. The schoolday schedule was different. Recess was held on a different part of the campus. Even the buses used a different entrance from when I was in school. So for all my complacency, believing I knew the place inside and out, it turned out there was plenty I didn't know about my old school by the time Tim arrived.

Somehow, even without my ersatz expertise, over the past year Tim has managed to get registered for high school classes, to gather the school supplies he thinks he'll need, even to navigate his way through two weeks of freshman football training already. And I know that tomorrow, he'll start learning his way around campus with no help or input from me. Because it turns out not to really matter whether I feel ready for this particular milestone or not. Freshman orientation starts tomorrow, and Tim feels ready. If I'm not so sure I'm ready, that's my problem, not his.

I like to think it's because of his nine happy years at our local K-8 school that he's able to make this transition so confidently. I'm the one who is filled with uncertainty. But no one is particularly concerned with how I feel. Unlike kindergarten walk-through, parents are not invited to freshman orientation at Concord-Carlisle High School. Tim will make his own way, and even if it's all unfamiliar to me, it will all be familiar to him within a matter of weeks. He'll do this transition without me. And hard as that may be for me to accept or envision, some part of me knows -- and celebrates -- that it's exactly as it should be.

Letters from camp (that are brief and inscrutable)

Months ago, when I signed up both kids for camp programs during this last week of July, I started thinking of it as "the West family All-Star break," because it reminded me of that brief interlude halfway through the Major League Baseball season when all the players get a break.

From that early vantage point, this particular week seemed to hold the potential to be a unique midsummer interlude for me. With Tim away at baseball camp in the Berkshires, it would mean significantly less cooking, less cleaning, less grocery shopping, less laundry -- and no evening baseball games to attend. And even though Holly’s program is at a local day camp, it still means no Disney TV shows yammering away in the background when I'm drafting articles, and no responsibility for me to plan her day's activities. I envisioned a stretch of five consecutive days when I had nothing to think about except my own tasks, errands, and work assignments.

But I didn't count on the fact that with it being Tim's first time at overnight camp, I'd be too anxious about his well-being to enjoy my All-Star Break Week Off at all.

Now that the week is under way, I'm trying hard to appreciate it for what it is: a week that provides a break from the busy jobs I juggle all summer long, typically an amalgam of meeting deadlines, keeping the house clean, and keeping the kids busy enough to be happy and social but unscheduled enough that they can relax and be resourceful about how to enjoy themselves.

But instead, I'm mostly just spending the time fretting about whether Tim is okay.

It's not that we have no way to be in touch with him. Though cell phone use isn’t allowed during the day, the camp allows the kids to text-message their parents for a few minutes before bed every night. But the texts we've received from Tim are not exactly what I would consider updates on his well-being; in fact, they require translation from Rick.

"What did he say?" I asked Rick excitedly when I heard Rick's text-message notification buzz at 9:03 last night.

Rick handed over his phone so that I could read their five-minute text-dialogue myself. "At SS, started off a 6-4-3," Tim wrote. "1st at-bat grounded to second off 80+ mph pitch; 2nd time walked."

"Why is he writing in code?" I asked Rick. "More importantly, how is he? Has he made friends? How's the food? Has he been sleeping well? Does he miss us very much?"

"He initiated a double-play from shortstop," Rick replied. "And he hit a grounder to second."

"But how is he?" I demanded again.

"He broke out of a season-long hitting slump and led a double-play!" Rick answered. "So he's doing great!"

I'm not sure I believe him. "Doing great," to my mind, would include phrases like "Camp has been fantastic!" and "I'm having a wonderful time!" and "The counselors are fun and the other kids are nice to me!" That's what a mother yearns to hear the first time her son goes to overnight camp. After all, he waited almost 15 years to ascend this milestone; now that we're here, I'd like a little information.

But very little more is forthcoming. The campers are allotted five minutes per evening for texting, and Tim apparently wishes to use those five minutes for telling his father his fielding and hitting stats rather than for allaying his mother's primal anxieties about his well-being.

Going to camp for the first time is a milestone for him, but I have to concede that it's one for me as well. As a kid, and well into my teen years -- okay, pretty much until my second attempt at college -- I had a terrible time leaving home. And my separation anxiety was, hands-down, the flaw I least wanted to see my children inherit.

Tim may not have much to say when it comes to communicating with me this week, but this much I can deduce: he's at camp and he's doing okay. And I'm doing okay too. He's learning to get by while away from home; I'm learning that he is his own person and may not choose to communicate his thoughts, feelings and experiences exactly as I might wish. I'm learning that this rite of passage for me as a mother means accepting that I simply won't know what he's doing and how he's feeling every moment of the day.

So I'll have to be content with the news that he executed a 6-4-3 from SS. It's not exactly the information I would wish to have, given that it tells me nothing about whether he's eating or sleeping well or even remembering to take regular showers, but for now, for this first week away, that's what he’s chosen to impart. I'll have to trust him to eat, sleep, wash, and be reasonably happy. And I'll have to trust Rick that a 6-4-3, whatever that might mean, is evidence enough of his well-being.

Next stop: Graduation

This coming week I'll help finish the preparations for my son Tim’s eighth grade graduation. I'm one of three event co-chairs, which seems fittingly symbolic: I'm executing tangible tasks -- overseeing programs and flowers, scheduling the graduation dance, renting the folding chairs -- to symbolize the end of his nine years at our local school.

Sometimes I think I've changed more than he has in these nine years. I was so starry-eyed as we registered for kindergarten. This is one of the most desirable school systems in the country; I felt so lucky to be able to live here and send my child here, and I was sure everything would be perfect. He'd have perfect teachers, make perfect friends, do all the right activities: soccer, band, middle school dances, Student Council. This was, after all, the same school I attended myself for grades kindergarten through eight, and almost all my memories of it were happy ones. 

But of course, public school isn't Disney World, no matter how highly rated the school system. Parents spar with the administration and gripe among themselves about teachers. Even the most exclusive suburbs, with parents who lavish every possible benefit on their children, produce kids who are occasionally unkind. And it turned out my kid didn't like soccer. Or band. Or Student Council. The middle school dances were fine -- until he went through his first break-up and didn’t want to go anymore for a while. That was one milestone I most definitely was not anticipating back at kindergarten orientation.

So Tim and I will both spend next week preparing for our departure, both emotionally and in practical ways as we finalize the graduation preparations. Next fall, he heads off for the first time in his life to a school that I did not attend and cannot picture. Since I went to private school and he'll go to public, I don't know the smell of the hallways or the color of the auditorium seats or where the buses load at the end of the day. This time Tim will learn it all for himself.

But really, he did last time, too. My notion that I knew all about our local school was an illusion. it was a good nine years, but things are more complicated than I anticipated. There were good parts and bad parts, and next week, as the other graduation volunteers and I confirm with the photographer, proofread the programs, and watch the kids head off on their daylong beach trip, Tim will be saying goodbye to teachers and acknowledging that there are friends he will hardly ever see next year. Eighth grade graduation is hardly a notable accomplishment. The truth is pretty much anyone can pull it off. But it's a milestone nonetheless.

Eighth grade class trip

I dropped Tim off at school at 6:30 yesterday morning. He was wide awake, alert, and eager to get going, even though it was an hour earlier than normal middle school drop-off time. In his backpack, in place of the usual pencils, notebooks and calculators, were toiletries, t-shirts, clean socks and underwear. Also two one-pound bags of his favorite candy, Sour Patch Kids, and a deck of cards.

In half an hour, after checking in at his homeroom and having his backpack searched for contraband substances, Tim, along with his 96 classmates, would be boarding the bus for the eighth grade class trip: two full days in the wilds of the Berkshires, one overnight at the Comfort Inn.

I’d gone to the parent meeting last week and had a pretty good idea of what the itinerary was for the trip. They’d spend the first day at a camp doing ropes courses and other team-building activities. Even though they weren’t spending the night there, they’d get to do the same nighttime activities that make nights at summer camp so memorable: dinner, campfires, reflecting upon the day’s activities. They’d spend the night at a hotel, three or four kids to a room, where the chaperones would check them in and then tape the doors shut. The kids were allowed to stay up as late as they wanted with their roommates, but no fraternizing between rooms. The second day would be spent at the Shakespeare & Company campus in Lenox, watching and taking part in Shakespearean scenes. They’d be home by evening.

“Which part are you looking forward to most?” I asked Tim as we drove to school. Despite the early hour, we hadn’t had to rush; Tim had been up in plenty of time to shower and dress and brush his teeth. He was refreshed, cheerful and energetic. “The camp visit? The play?”

“The hotel overnight,” said Tim. “Me and Austin and Will are going to stay up all night playing poker and using Sour Patch Kids in place of poker chips.”

This wasn’t on the itinerary that the eighth grade teachers distributed at our meeting last week. But I appreciated his honesty, and I was just glad that he was prepared to have a good time, whatever the means. He hasn’t gone away much. He’s never been to summer camp. One-night sleepovers with close friends are really the extent of his time away from home, at this point.

So I was a little bit apprehensive about his departure. But only a very little bit, because he was going to be with kids he’s known for nearly a decade and teachers he’s known all year.

It was a precursor to later this summer, when he’ll finally have his first summer camp experience. That’s for only a week, and he assures me he’s not anxious in the least. He’s probably telling the truth. I’m anxious, though. It’s always hard to separate from your children, whether it’s at the infant daycare center your first day back at work – I did this when Tim was four months old – or the first day of kindergarten or leaving them at the soccer field for their first practice.

And this is only the beginning. But he’s ready, and I need to be also. Saying goodbye for a two-day trip didn’t seem like a big deal, until I thought of all the goodbyes that this one presaged: college, eventually; maybe studying abroad; maybe military service. This one is easy; but it’s only a lead-in to more complicated separations.

Nonetheless, it’s a start. We’ll drop him off at summer camp in a couple of months and hope again that it will be a good experience. I’ll say goodbye and then worry a little, just as I am now. But one step at a time. I know he has good emotional coping skills and is happy and confident about this trip.

Besides, he has two pounds of Sour Patch Kids. He’ll be fine.