Being Brought Up To Speed

Emma is thirteen. Thirteen is hard. Not hard in the way I feared when I thought about thirteen so many years ago when she was a baby. I feared she'd be addicted to meth or something by thirteen. But she's not. She's a great kid - good grades, well-behaved, involved in some fun healthy activities, lots of friends.

But...

It's still hard.

She wants more independence from me and I understand that. It's what we all really ultimately want for our kids, isn't it? We want them to be healthy, happy, independent, contributing adults. They aren't going to get there if they remain dependent on us. It has to happen sometime and thirteen seems to be the age that the inevitable occurs.

But oh how I miss her. I miss knowing everything about her life (her friends do now). I miss being the go-to person in her life (her friends are now). I miss hanging out with her (she hangs out with her friends now). I miss her wearing princess dresses (none of her friends would be caught dead in one now).

I will admit that I'm one of the more fortunate moms though. She does seem to share more with me than her friends share with their moms. The silence that descends between mother and child at this age is so very hard to accept. And from what the other mothers tell me, they have to keep getting their hearing checked to make sure they haven't suddenly gone deaf. Ooooohhhh, I haven't gone deaf. WHEW! It's just my kid pretending that I don't exist! What. a. RE-LIEF!!

With this in mind, I will take any little tidbit of information about Emma's current life that she chooses to grace me with. The other day, on the way home from school, she tells me that Matthew finally asked Marilyn out - "FINALLY!" This was big news indeed. Matthew had been trying to build up the courage to ask Marilyn out for weeks. (Which, I always thought was kind of funny because Marilyn is hardly an intimidating girl, and she liked Matthew and Matthew knew that she liked him so....what's the big risk really Matthew? Man-up and ask the girl out already!)

As Emma and I were chatting about this - when he asked her, where he asked her, how he asked her, what she said back when he asked her, etc. - she concludes the story with, "And then the WHOLE CLASS was staring at them all during lunch! It was EMBARRASSING!"

I was confused. "Why was everyone staring at them?" She sighs deeply at my ignorance and says, "Because they sat together at our table and they've never done that before so everyone knew that they were going out now."

Oh, I see. I get it now.

"So, when you 'go out' you have to sit together at lunch?"

She sighs very loudly again, rolls her eyes, looks at me with a disgusted expression on her face and replies, "It's STRONGLY advised, Mom."

Six months, eleven days, fourteen hours and nine minutes until she's done being thirteen.