Pia Hansen: When son goes to high school, mom gets left behind

It’s been six weeks. There are days when it feels like it’s been a lot longer – and days when it seems like my life changed yesterday. I feel uprooted, reeling, searching. My heart has to find a new beat, a new pulse. Some days I feel so free – other days I nurse a longing for something I can’t really describe, yet I know I can’t have again.

Every morning I have one flashback or another, especially when I notice my car smelling like cigarette smoke, salami sandwiches and Axe.

My son started high school and where I drop him off, other students gather to smoke. I drive off thinking “they look so young – they are just kids,” and I remember how adult I felt when I started high school.

I guess I noticed my son had really changed when we came back from vacation, right before school began.

I’m not a tall person, but he’s now taller than me no matter how or when we compare ourselves, back to back, shoulders touching.

His voice changed, and guess who didn’t hear it? Me.

When my girlfriends called the house, they demanded to know who the man was answering the phone. And this mom blushed. I can’t think that thought to its end.

My first day of high school was 24 years ago in Denmark. I remember that my hair was newly permed (this was 1983 after all) and that my outfit was mainly mint green. With ankle socks, also mint green. I didn’t know a soul in my homeroom of 20 – we were the outlying kids, and the big city school dumped us all into the same unit, regardless that some of us lived 30 miles apart on opposite ends of the county.

Until a few weeks ago, what I knew about American high schools I learned from movies like “Grease” and from listening to my American friends talk about band camp and science class and their first kisses. And first car rides. And their first – well, you know, um, football, they also talk a lot about football.

What I love most about being a parent is to watch my kid gain new skills and become more self-sufficient. I never could relate to the crying moms and dads on the first day of kindergarten or second grade or middle school, wailing “my little baby is gone.” Um, yeah, and that’s mostly a good thing from an evolutionary and emotional perspective – it’s how it is supposed to be. Not that I don’t occasionally miss the little towheaded boy who rode his green plastic tractor at insane speeds down the hill on South Fiske.

As parents, if we do our job reasonably well, our kids are bound to grow and learn and venture out and live without us. Or at least away from us.

We borrow them for a while, and then we set them loose in a world full of MySpace and Google and $100 sneakers and jeans with more ass than waist and iTunes. And we worry and pray and cross our fingers.

I’m sure that’s what my parents did when I began listening to “Frankie Goes To Hollywood” and emulating Madonna’s fashion style. I’m sure my dad, who raised me on Cream, The Who and Jimi Hendrix, quietly cried himself to sleep thinking all was lost.

Am I worried about sending my kid off to high school? No, not really. The only thing that does worry me is that I may come face-to-face with what I was like during high school, but this time as the parent.

I was a lonely kid, which manifested itself in me being very independent. If “everybody” did one thing, you could pretty much count on me doing or stating the opposite. I never met my curfew except possibly once. My homework was consistently done, but always at the last minute, and my boyfriend had a motorcycle. I never was one of the “it girls,” and I had about as many friends as my cat has: none. But the world was totally and completely my oyster.

So far, this household is adjusting fine to high school, as long as my son continues to meet his curfew, of course. Oh, and “Go Tigers!”