Eighteen

I received lots of mixed news today.  Good, bad, weird, exciting, scary, all at once.  It's going to take me a while to settle down to sleep.

Anyway, the boy has been 18 for a while now.  He's a man.  Ish.  Like many men his age, he's both eager to meet his future but unclear about what he wants it to be.  And that's the thing.  Creating a future is a tricky thing, especially to so many young people to whom it seems things just happen.  After all, they've had their whole lives planned out and scheduled for them up to this point.  

He hasn't been cast adrift yet, but I've been more than hinting that the creation process must now begin and that the clock that measures how much more time he has to live at home has begun to tick.  To me all the possibilities are clear, and if I were him I would be exploring like crazy, researching those possibilities, discovering new ones, searching for my passion and joy and getting prepared for what I want to be.  I'm happy he's content at the moment, and I'm glad he has some plans, but they're typical tentative, small-scale, short-sighted things or so far flung (like being a colonist on Mars--not an explorere but a settler when everything's set up (he's assuming this will happen in his lifetime, a hard suppose)) that he can afford to be very hand-wavy about what he'll do in the meantime.  Normal, normal, normal.  I'm not concerned, and I refuse to start bossing him and directing him because then he'll never learn this stuff.  If I do, it'll always be forces outside of him moving him around like a puppet rather than he himself moving himself around learning what it's like to be an adult.  It's hard to watch him flop about on the ground, though, when I know he can fly.  It's the classic 'if I had to do it all over again, I would' moment in a parent's life.  

Patience, young mother.  He too will learn, and he will soar.