An update on eldest child: I am happy to report that H's recent change to the private hippie "unchooling" high school seems to have been 100% positive for him. For the first time since I can remember, he seems excited about being at school, and self-motivated (as opposed to me standing over his bed each morning, hollering at him to get out the door to school) to get where he needs to be each day, and to participate in what is going on at the school. Two of his friends transferred from his old school to the new school at the same time he did, so he immediately had friends there, and he's made new ones as well. He just seems generally much happier than he has been for a long time.
The school is definitely very unconventional. Although he has actual classes, he also has tremendous freedom there to take his interests wherever he wants to go.He doesn't have real homework, and right now, his primary school interest is sound mixing - - you know, like music engineering, using actual instruments, as well as messing around with looping and mixing software on the computer. He has asked for DJ equipment for Christmas, and he says he'd like to eventually start spinning at parties.
It's very hard for me to let go of my worry that as a junior in high school, he should be paying more attention to Hemingway and chemistry - just like I did - and less attention to things like illustrating a children's book (another school project) or mucking around with music software for entire afternoons. But after living through the past four or five years when he became increasingly negative toward and disengaged from anything related to school, it's nice to see him truly interested in something, and making some effort at it. Before, he hated school so much that he had mentally checked out, even though I was forcing him to show up each day. He wasn't learning anything, and he was miserable. Something had to give, or I was really afraid he wouldn't graduate at all. Now he seems excited about school, and life, and learning.
Another big change is that I am seeing a whole lot less of him lately. H would move out of our house and get his own place in a heartbeat if I would let him, and if he could afford it. But I've told him he's stuck living at home until he turns 18, plus he hasn't made any effort thus far to earn the cash necessary to pay for his own place. Since he says he wants to live independently for his senior year of high school, I've been encouraging him to get organized around that idea, and begin earning and saving some money. We'll see if that actually happens.
In the meantime, however, he is following my requirements regarding being at home, which are pretty minimal at this point. He has to be by 11 on weeknights, for example. Unfortunately, since I am almost always in bed before 11, there are a lot of days when I don't see him, since I leave for work before he leaves for school. We do talk on the phone and text each other a few times each day, every day, and I try to make time for regular mother-son one-on-one time. I pop into his bedroom to give him a kiss on the forehead each morning before I leave for my job. And tonight, he and I are going out to dinner together - just the two of us. But in general, I just see very little of him these days. He has a friend from his school who is legally emancipated from his parents, and who has his own apartment - within walking distance of the school both the boys attend. Needless to say, this guy's apartment has become a very attractive hangout for H. I think that it's sort of like his second home these days.
I worry about him all the time because he's away from me so much now. I sometimes literally wake up in the middle of the night with a sudden terror that I'm not there to oversee what he's doing, and something bad is going to happen to him. Is he making good decisions? Is he showing good judgment? Am I going to get a call at 3am on a Saturday night from the ER, or from the police, saying that my teenage boy has done something incredibly stupid? But really, that's something I no longer have much control over. He's got one foot out the door, and is pretty much "cooked" as my parents use to say. Whatever decisions he's going to make, or choices he pursues are largely beyond my influence, and I am certainly not naive enough to believe that he isn't engaged in some stuff I wish he weren't doing. At least he isn'tt driving, so that's one less thing I have to worry about. I just have to hope that the intensive parenting I've put in with him in the past 17 years will continue to resonate with him even when I am not around enough to keep him safe until he matures a bit more in his decision-making faculties. As not all of his choices in adolescence thus far have been particularly wise or healthy, I have to hope he's at least learned from some of the dumber things he's already done.
When I was 17, I was a year ahead of H in high school, and I, too had an emotional and social life that was increasingly removed from my parents' oversight. Before I turned 18 - the day after high school graduation - I moved out of their house with their blessing, and took off for Europe, and then college. Except for brief stints of a couple of weeks here and there, I never lived at home again. I made some excellent decisions, and some very bad ones during late adolescence. I had some great experiences, and some terrible ones. But I always felt like my parents had my back during that turbulent period, even when I was many miles away - literally or figuratively. I felt empowered by their apparent trust in me to lead my own life, without a lot of active interference from them. And I counted on them to help me pick up the pieces when I made a complete mess of things, which I did on several occasions before reaching true adulthood.
I hope I can do that for H. It surely is hard to let go, though. And I really miss him already.
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