They don't stay "Toys R Us" kids forever... darn it!

My son officially entered Middle School this morning and I’m still trying to get over my separation anxiety. Its been hard for me to let go this year, mostly because middle school was the toughest set of years for me in public school and I'm afraid my son is going to get beat up because, like me, he has a smart aleck mouth that gets him in trouble and, also like me, my boy isn’t much of a brawler. (He's going to get clobbered, I just know it!)

As we’ve been getting ready for the new school year at the new school, my panic has seemed to increase in direct proportion to his desire to be more independent. In fact, he informed me this morning after my offer to walk him to class, “I am old enough not to have to have my mother walk me to class. I’m becoming a man, you know.”

No, I didn’t know… well, maybe I suspected, but have been clinging to my denial with more and more desperation rather than face, let alone accept, that fact that he's growing up and becoming a man. In some respects, he’s made it easy for me to remain in denial, especially his tendency towards absentmindedness. Like this morning, when he came to ask me what he should pack for P.E., specifically which kind of T-shirt he should use, long or short sleeved.

ME: “Didn’t we spend hours Friday night, going over what you’d need for P.E.?”

THE BOY: “Yes.”

ME: “And when we went through your shirts, which ones did we look at?”

THE BOY: “The short sleeved ones.”

ME: “Why?”

THE BOY: “Because the long sleeve ones would be too hot.”

ME: “So which kind do you think you should pack?”

THE BOY, in a tone that clearly implies guessing: “A short sleeved one?”

And the conversations go like that… him insisting he's becoming an adult and then doing something totally childlike. Hmmm, now that I think about it, I guess he is becoming a man, after all!

So in the end, after reminding him of everything I could think of, I “manned” up and let him go in to his new school by himself. Because he’s “becoming a man.”

A man who forgot his darn glasses when he got out of the car, but I can’t even make too big a deal about that since as I drove away, plagued with thoughts like “OMG! What if he can’t find the right bus to ride home after school?,” I realized that I had just made the biggest mistake a Mom who worries too much could ever make: I forgot to write our phone numbers down on all his new notebooks.

I wonder if Mr. Becoming A Man knows how to hitchhike?