Growing Pains

I am not an overly emotional person. I don't cry at many movies, and love to mock my husband who does. I am a pretty tough woman...able to leap tall buildings with a single bound, etc and so forth.

This hasn't been the case lately. I seem to cry at the drop of a dime.

No, it's not hormones. I think it is the bittersweet time of life called Senior Year. Not mine, mind you....my daughter's.

People had warned me ahead of time that your child's Senior year is an emotional time...but remember...I am not a sentimental person. I am also not one of those mom's who has every step and milestone of her child's life preserved in a keepsake box. For better or worse, we are a pretty fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants family. It works for us.

Lately though we have been consumed by prom, band banquet, graduation plans, graduation party plans, the imminent descent of the grandparents AND.....drumroll please: Mad's 18th birthday.

Can you believe it? I will have an 18 year old.

According to Madelaine, this means that we can't call her up and ask her where she is and who she is with; this means that she doesn't have a curfew and can have her boyfriend over when we are not home.

Silly girl.

We had a long talk last night. Well, there was yelling involved. It ended with her asking me to find out how much it would cost for her to live in an apartment. I mentioned that if she felt grown up enough to live on her own, she may want to do her own research. Sigh.

Part two of the conversation was much quieter and happened later that night. I told Madelaine that while she was learning how to be a grown up, we were learning how to be the parents of a grown up. Just as the parent of an infant needs different skills than the parents of a school child, we are learning a whole new skill set. At the same time, she needs to realize that we will be more inclined to see her as a grown up when she starts acting a bit more rational.

Unlike her mother who cries at the drop of a dime.