AUGH

The collage hanging in our stairway

Guys? This is the part where you lie to me, tell me that, no, it was just the little kid years that flew by like I was blinking, that the rest of it slows way down, that he’s going to stop morphing into a man while I’m standing here, watching it happen.

He went to “shadow” at the second hippie-dippy middle school yesterday, and I’m really going to need to come up with another nickname for it if he gets in, because that sounds like I’m not 100% on-board with the whole concept. It’s not exactly far off the mark when Eric calls me a dirty hippie, myself, so, sure, I’m down with Sam potentially calling his teachers by their first names and stopping to pet the school dog on his way down to the bathroom where they’re growing the hydroponic tomatoes. Cool with me, y’know? More importantly, cool with him. Yesterday’s visit was a particular success, since he actually got to know a couple kids by name, and he got to sit in on a comics class. No kidding. So he likes that school, I’d have to say.

We’re in the waiting game now, where we’ll chew our nails and check the mail to see if his name gets picked in the lottery to attend either charter school. If not, well, he’ll go to Mega-Middle and be a good little cog. I know, I know. I’m not telling him that! I’m being all sugar and cream about the whole business, talking to him about each school’s pros and cons, and he thinks he’d probably be happy anywhere. (Mega-Middle has ROBOTICS. That soothes a lot of worries for a ten-year-old boy.) ALl the same, I heard him pray last night to get into one of the hippie schools, and darn it, I’m not a rock. That twisted my gut.

This is stupid, really. We didn’t do this when I was a kid. You lived in a neighborhood, so you went to that school. My elementary school fed to three different middle schools, and if your parents didn’t like the one you were supposed to go to, well, then, it was the Christian school for you, where they had to hold their hands folded at their waists when they walked demurely down the halls. (I had friends who went there.) There wasn’t a whole lot of anxiety involved, so far as I was aware. Maybe we have too many choices these days. Maybe if this wasn’t going on at the same time as my friends with younger kids are frantically doing the “which elementary school?” dance, which is constantly keeping it at the forefront of my brain. Gah.

In the meantime, little Gabe is obsessed with Pokemon, and that’s JUST FINE. He can stay small, and obsessed with small child things, just as long as he wants.