This morning, I toured a potential middle school for my oldest son, Mason. It felt surreal to walk such a big campus, labeled with a “Visitor” sticker on the outside of my baby carrier, watching what can no longer be called “children” going about their school day — some of whom were taller than I am. The tour was particularly jarring because earlier this week, I went on a kindergarten field trip to the grocery store and a pizza restaurant with my youngest son. That’s the speed I am used to: learning about the grocery store freezer and helping small hands make their own pizzas. But these children I saw today at the middle school no longer need nap mats or help tying their shoes. These “children” had boobs and facial hair. Shudder.
My tour today made me realize that although I’m used to identifying myself as the mother of young children — and thank goodness that is still true — I’m also the mother of a not-so-small child. I’m also the mother of a — gulp — ‘tween. I’m staring down the barrel of the gun that is parenting a young teenager, and I am appropriately terrified at the prospect.
I’ve been dreading sending him to middle school almost since the day Mason was born. Like just about everyone else I know, I don’t have the best memories of middle school. But my fear about this age extends farther than worrying about sending my firstborn into the wilds of a new, bigger campus with new, bigger children. If childhood is a fairy tale, middle school is the deep, dark, enchanted forest of doubt and confusion that the hero must survive in order to get to the happy ending of high school, where kids seem to find their niche and figure things out. I feel like the parents of middle schoolers just have to hold their collective breath and hope their children come out on the other side relatively unscathed.
Writer and blogger Katie Allison Granju wrote about this age when her eldest son, Henry, was thirteen for Andrea Buchanan’s collection of essays, It’s a Boy: Women Writers on Raising Sons. In that piece, she wrote:
I hope that the years we spent together in the warm cocoon of his early childhood offered him some immunization against the slings and arrows of adolescence. I hope that the slips of the hand that I’ve made in unearthing the man he is becoming haven’t banged him up or scarred him too terribly. Mostly, I hope he will continue to talk to me and tell me or show me what I can do—or not do—to support and guide him in finding his own way. Really, I think that’s increasingly all that’s left for a mother of a teenage boy to do.
I’m not sure I could express more eloquently the way I feel about sending my firstborn into adolescence. I watch him walk around these middle school campuses — all legs and arms and impossibly big feet, his hair a sandy mop on his head, completely unaware that he has the beautiful skin of a child combined with piercing blue eyes that make grown women swoon — and I am already grieving leaving his boyhood behind. It all went by so incredibly fast, and it seemed to happen while I was trying to get my bearings as a mother and couldn’t focus on the details enough to realize it was happening. Perhaps that is the curse of the first child: as a mother, I never knew what I had until it was over and we were moving on to the next stage, because I had been so disoriented and thrown by the last transition.
I now find parenting a ten-year-old alongside an infant particularly bittersweet and poignant, as I see reflections of my oldest in my youngest and realize how far away from babyhood he actually is. It makes me squeeze both of them a little harder these days. It makes it just a little harder to send both of them to bed each night, knowing tomorrow they will both be infinitesimally bigger. And yet with both of them, I am also excited every day to see how each of them grow and change and become who they are.
I don’t feel old enough to have a child going into middle school next year. I still feel as unsure and awkward as I did when I started middle school. Let’s hope that with my son I’ll be wiser and make better decisions than I did then, when I wore quilted white pants on my first day of sixth grade… in August. In Florida. Here’s hoping.
It’s such an amazingly beautiful yet scary age. Hugs to us moms of tweens as they further this journey to independence. xoxo
I read this in tears. I think you know how intensely I relate, how mired I am in these same bittersweet and emotional waters. And, also, the odd vertigo of realizing I’m actually an ADULT now, despite feeling utterly unready for all of those responsibilities. Thank God I have your company on this journey. Thank you. xox
I am so far from parenting a tween right now but I have an inkling that my feelings will be much the same. The fear of sending my boy into the big, bad world, wondering if I’ve done enough to prepare him. Sigh.
I have one with boobs and one with facial hair, and one who is quickly approaching middle school, as well.
Although I am so sad to see my days mothering a little kid pass by, I am thouroughly enjoying parenting teenagers.
Yes, you read that right.
Don’t get me wrong. It’s not all rainbows and roses, but as my kids get older and become more of themselves, I am realizing now, more than ever, that I really like them. They are really neat people.
That being said, someone will have to be picking me up off of the floor when I drop my daughter off at college in a couple years.
You big tease!… you leave us with the “quilted white pants on the first day of 6th grade” image but no photo of said outfit?? What kind of blogger do you think you are? You know you need to share THAT photo!! 🙂 Great post though… I am terrified of middle school. In my gut, I really suspect that it is going to be a very hard few years for Elise – more so than for my other two kids. I guess we can navigate it together.
Lindsey’s blog led me to this- wonderful!! I have a 3 year old son and it’s so good to hear a little of what’s ahead and what I ought to pay attention to (and appreciate) now. Middle school was by far my least favorite time. Thanks for sharing.