Here

For the first time since I became a mother, I cried after a phone call with one of my children yesterday. Not an eye well. Not an “I am so proud” type of tear, either. It was a holy hell kind of tear. The one that is the result of the ghostly punch in the gut. Not that I haven’t felt the punch in the gut before. But this one hit me at my most weakened state of motherhood, so therefore, I cried.

I have good kids. Really, really good kids. They do make me proud, and often. They make me laugh. They make me think. They, just being, make me feel vulnerable to the world around me. A world that while beautiful and satisfying, can also add anxiety, just in the mundane to even the King and Queen of laid back parents. And I am not a laid back parent. At all. I wish I could be.

As soon as I hung up the phone I started to cry while in the parking lot at Starbucks. I started to bawl, my tears stinging my winter laced cheeks. My daughter, who was sitting behind me in the back seat of the car, promptly unbuckled her seat belt and jumped onto the center console wrapping her arms around me and tilting her head towards mine she whispered “he’s going to be okay.”

What a God send that she was there. What an ass I am. For it is not very often that I find myself needing comfort. Especially from my 13 year old, as I unravel, latte in hand. I am so thankful that she was there. She made it easier to handle.

My son’s best friend, a few months older than him, got his driver’s license last week. My son slept over his house last night and they planned on going out for pizza and driving to a mutual friend’s house today. Yesterday he called to ask for my permission to do all of those things, including being in the passenger seat of a car of a newly licensed driver. A control freak’s biggest fear.

The mack daddy.

Now in April, he will be going to London. He will be flying in a plane for the first time. I have entrusted my boy’s welfare to others’ many times before, of course, and have gotten used to the fact that he is bordering on an adult and will, in the blink of an eye, be leaving our home to make his own life. But for some reason, none of this compares in the fear factor department to the act of driving with his peers. Not the bus trip to DC. Not the theater workshop in New York. Having him away for a solid week from his family and his home is a piece of cake on my end. Having him spend the weekend with friends, going on vacations with his best buddy, etc, etc.

This feels different. Boy does it feel different. I now must rely on one of his friends for his safety. And what dawned on me in the parking lot of Starbucks, NO, what smacked me in the face, is that there is no turning back. This is it. We have arrived.

I have entered the zone of waiting for him to get home at night and not being able to sleep until he does safely, to answering my phone that much quicker, to wondering if I don’t get the confirmation text back, if everything is okay…or not. To facing front and center the fears that become overwhelmingly, mind numbing.

How crazy am I?

I know.

I could say “No” to all of these things. “Nope, stay home with meeeeee…..”.  It’s tempting.

Why can’t I be the Mom that doesn’t think twice about it? Why can’t I be the one that starts taking the photography class I have always wanted to take? The one that takes place in the late afternoon, that thus far happens right smack dab in the shuffling part of our day, where my kids need to be at other places. Why not let my son be driven around by his buddies wherever he needs to go? In a few months, when my son gets his driver’s license, will he be toting my daughter back and forth to Lacrosse or to her friends’ houses while I catch a movie, have dinner with friends, a drink with my husband? Shouldn’t I be excited about the prospect of hanging up my chauffer’s hat?

Almost the whole of this last paragraph makes me sick to my stomach, my furrow lines just got a little deeper, and the distance between me and my son feels like it just got a little wider.

So, to counteract, we have developed a checking in system, a quick text that says ‘here’ when he reaches his destination. Does this make anybody cringe? Is this a little tidbit for the helicopter mother handbook? Perhaps. Does it make me feel better?

Not really.

What I know instinctively is that I trust him. As much as I can trust any teenager. Especially knowing what history says about teenagers like me. And it feels like pay back time. I didn’t get it. I wanted out and away from my parents as soon as I could. I would  drive around with my friends often, almost biting it a few times. And by biting it I mean careless, dangerously careless. I never, ever knew just how careless I was. I had no clue.

I have to ask myself this: Am I/we the new breed of parents that hover, no BLANKET, our kids? Not just hovering, but COVERING over them with thick, heavy wool as they try to exercise their independence?  I may just be the President of the Covering and Smothering Parents Association. I am surely, at least, the Vice President.

(Big run on sentence time…)

So, when he called me today, after I called him, because I didn’t get my ‘here’ text in the time I had allotted in my own head for him to get from point A to point B and my heart started pounding and I figured I would just call the whole thing off, no more driving with anyone, he immediately called me to put me at ease and we talked about how important the text ‘here’ was.

Here.

I am here.

My son is responsible and he is smart. He is my world as sappy as it is. So this is what I have left:

May fate and destiny and all of the universal mystical crazy things that exist and those that have passed on to the other side (if there is such a thing) protect my boy and his genuine heart and his young body and his sharp mind. Please just do it.

I will bite my lip. I will turn away when I well up. I will run screaming throught the center of town in my dreams.

But I will not turn away from here.