The View From Here - On The Cusp of My Son Being Grown

This evening my son is at a special dinner event to honor Eagle Scouts. I wish that I was there with him, but did not work out that way.

This, the place that I am in, is a rather unexpected place to be. I am so proud of the young man he as become. We have weathered the difficult storm that we had to navigate through when he was in the middle of his teen years. In the last four or five months he has matured so much.

He is wise, thoughtful, passionate and intense. He is a wonderful person. In just a few short months he will be graduating from high school, the very school that we started for him. I believe he is both excited and a bit nervous. Up until now he has spent his life with myself or his dad close at hand. I stayed home with him until he was ready to go to school. My husband teaches at our school. When he leaves AVS he will be going out into the real world - ON HIS OWN.

Intellectually, I know he will be fine, or rather, more than fine. He has focus and a bit of magic in his life. He has a knack for making things go the way he needs them to go.

Emotionally, I find myself in an odd place, the very place I was standing just before he entered school. I wonder and I worry. Were we strict enough when we needed to be? Have we been supportive enough, but also helped him have a realistic view of the world? Have we given him the tools he will need to navigate the rocky, choppy waters ahead? What will it be life when he moves out? Oh my, how I will miss him. (Okay, this part makes me weepy and so I will change directions.)

He has come to a place where he seems content, happy and with a sense of purpose. He has a plan, a good one, for his future. He loves to be active and work with his hands. He wants to earn a degree in welding and then use that to help make an engineering degree a possibility. But he is at a place where he must earn a specific score on a math test in order to be able to follow that pathway. He spent the last few weeks making up for years of not doing enough math. He is working through 25 sections a day. I hold my breath, wishing my math skills were good enough to help him, but they are not. Luckily, he dad is able to help him. He works late into the night. He took the test on Wednesday and missed the mark. He has until next Wednesday, to make it happen. Otherwise, his plans will take a slight modification in finding his way there. I wish I had the power to make it happen. But I also know that those struggles are going to produce some of the most valuable lessons that he needs to learn.

I love my son and I am proud of him.. I look forward the bright future he has ahead of him. I am thankful that I am able to be part of it all.