My youngest son, Evan, is now a freshmen in a local high school. He was anxious about going because he’d heard the rumors that every rising ninth grader hears: the upper classmen target you; in fact, they will target YOU specifically especially if you are short.
All summer he has been measuring himself against me, having grown about five inches in the last year. I now look at his chin. But this doesn’t mean he is tall yet.
The men in our family are average height. . .not short, not tall. They tend to range between 5’10” and 6”, if you leave out a set of cousins whose Dad was 6’5”. The man was not a blood uncle, so my sons can forget that gene pool.
My youngest was born an average length and a solid weight of 8 lbs. 4 oz. But he has been below the curve of average size most of his life. Some of this is heredity; some the fault of the ADD meds he has had to take which curb his appetite. But no matter what I do to circumvent these effects, my boy is simply built like his Dad in bone-skinny, and me in height-short.
I am certain he will catch up to his peers soon since he is still hovering on the child side of puberty, while many have gone far beyond. And having taught high school for years, I know a growth spurt when I see one coming on. I’ve watched countless boys 5 foot and some odd inches leave ninth grade and come back men in the fall of their tenth grade year, or even the eleventh. . .or twelfth.
No big deal.
To me.
But to him, he knows that there are ADULT males at the school: seventeen and eighteen year olds who weigh 250 pounds and roam the halls looking for kids like him to carry around by the hair. Good thing Evan is witty. And he tries very hard to hide these superstitions, too, posturing as older and wiser than that.
But here’s the thing that makes my tears well. My youngest is still the youngest of not just my family, but of his peers in terms of maturity, and I’m watching him struggle with leaving childhood behind. He shifts between being stoic and manly, and whiny and emotional, between knowing things he shouldn’t yet, or oddly innocent of common knowledge.
A few weeks ago, he did express this fear of these giant upper classmen and their possible hazing of the freshmen. I comforted him by saying, “That’s mostly rumor and lies. Seniors and Juniors are far too busy just living their lives, dating, working, applying to colleges. The tenth graders are the ones to worry about. . .”
“Whaaat?”
“I’m just kidding. Sort of.”
We smiled, but we both knew it was simply one of those rites of passage he’d have to face, just like the inevitable teasing he and his buddies have gone through as their voices began to squeak and squawk into something deeper. (His is still wavering up and down.)
Then toward the end of the week, I had to get a document notarized. As we waited for the UPS store to open, he said, “How am I going to handle being an adult? I hardly know anything. Like Notary. What the heck is a Notary? There’s so much I don’t know.” He listed a few things from the previous week that were news to him.
I said, “Relax. No ninth grader knows what a notary is. I’m sure I didn’t at your age.” And then I explained their duties.
But he’s right. There is so much Evan doesn’t know that I or his brother did know at his age. My youngest, because of his dysgraphia, is not a reader, and readers are filled with information, even if much of it is useless.
“Well, you know how you fix that. .Read more, watch more news, get out of the house and do more stuff. . .” I said, mentioning how he had been attached to the same pajama bottoms day in and out all summer. “The more you experience. . .the more you know.”
Luckily, this is our son who loves to travel with us, and he does love new experiences, so his fear of being an adult ignoramus is somewhat baseless. But I knew I was listening to a child face his future as a man who had to “know stuff.”
Then this past weekend. . .after snapchatting or tweeting or whatever young teens are doing now, with a girl who might or might not be his girlfriend. . .he came downstairs and asked if we could watch Harry Potter together. After thirty minutes of digging, we located our DVD collection. We hadn’t touched them in probably four years or more.
Tony and I sat with Evan, inside on a sunny Sunday afternoon, while we watched Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (or Philosopher’s Stone, for the Brits.) At the moment Harry enters Olivander’s store to get fitted for his wand, my youngest raced upstairs looking for his two wands that we had bought the year Universal opened its version of Diagon Alley. Again, I had to help poke around to find where the toys were.
And my boy, who just a few days before was yucking it up with me as we viewed a particularly adult version of Key and Peele, spent the rest of The Sorcerer’s Stone watching with a wand in both hand.
Yesterday was Evan’s first day of high school.
And many of you might know, there is a vast mental age gap between middle school and high school. Students go from being led in a formal and silent line down the hall to the cafeteria, to near autonomy at lunch time. Their lockers in middle school are usually inside their homerooms and assigned to them. In high school, they buy them if there are any left over, and rarely see the little closets all year. He’s moved from a school with 1300 pupils, to one with 3400. He has more teachers, more subjects, and more strangers in his life than ever before.
He came home exhausted. We went over his homework, and organized his new notebooks to his teachers’ liking. I fed him pancakes and bacon, a special breakfast-for-dinner occasion. He asked to watch Chamber of Secrets, another Harry Potter, this time without the wands. And my child, beat from getting up at 5 a.m. and navigating pending adulthood, went upstairs to go to bed early.
When I came up to kiss him good night, I found him already sleeping. But not in his room. . .instead, he was curled up in my bed, on my pillow, soundly out. How many years has it been since he stopped climbing into our bed at night?
And I can’t tell which made me more weepy: the joy or the pain that both come from watching him cling to his childhood, or from knowing this would be probably one the last few moments I could baby him.
In a few weeks, he won’t even remember how uncomfortable starting high school was. He will be fine.
Steering with My Elbows 