Middle School Bound

The postcard in the mail said “Middle School Dessert Night.” Must be a wrong address. I am too old for middle school and quite frankly, I wasn’t a big fan of it the first time. We often get the wrong mail. Oh….wait…..Middle School PARENT Dessert Night. Hmmmm….uh oh. Can it be? I quickly did the math. Audrey’s only 8. No way 8 is old enough for middle school. She still has teeth left to lose, swings left to swing on and the field trip to the not-so-interesting rock museum. That leaves Mason…

I started to panic. Is it really time? I guess 6^th grade really does come after 5^th. Is winter over? How did this happen? After I finished my panic attack at the mailbox, I composed myself enough to get home. He’s too smart to hold back a grade – not to mention too old. Drat. Turns out that I am indeed a parent of an almost-middle-schooler and I have to go to the dessert night. It’s the responsible parent thing to do – oh and there will be dessert. That’s important too.

When my kids were small I swore I was going to skip over middle school. I wasn’t sure how it would exactly work but I had NO INTEREST in stepping foot in a middle school again and I certainly don’t want to parent a middle schooler. I was a good kid in general. But even so, in middle school I was dramatic, moody and definitely did a few things that I am not very proud of. You couldn’t pay me enough to revisit those days. And to the people who teach middle schoolers? Saints.

Now what do I do? I can’t home school Mason unless he just wants to learn PE, microbiology and English. I guess that could work if he aspires to be a fit, microbiologist that writes papers on bacteria. He doesn’t.

The dessert night was actually pretty impressive. The teachers seemed nice. The building is beautiful. The whole environment was very calm and peaceful…BECAUSE THERE WEREN'T ANY KIDS THERE…Heaven help me. Ready or not, September will come and I will have a middle schooler. I pray that the kids he hangs out with now and will meet are good, solid kids. I pray that he has someone to sit with at lunch and that he can open his locker. I hope he doesn’t get bullied or do any bullying himself. I hope when he gets home from school he talks to me with words that involve more than one syllable (hey, a girl can dream). 

I imagine that we will all make it to the other side of the next three years. Hopefully we will get there with some laughter, grace and not too many tears.  I hope I don’t need to be medicated to get there. 

As I have been wrestling this past month with my own anxieties about parenting a middle school kid and how fast he is growing up, Mason provided some perspective. When he was about four we would take our dog on walks and he LOVED to watch people’s sprinklers when they would turn on. We would stand for quite a while and watch those sprinklers. It was even better when one sprinkler would get stuck and not pop back down when it was done. He would run over and push it down with his feet. Made the boy gleeful. Yesterday, we were walking to the bus together…yes, he still lets me walk him. We saw a sprinkler still up and before I could even say anything, he went over and pushed it down and smiled at me his big, sweet smile with his teeth full of braces. We might just make it.