The young hairdresser, earlobes hanging low with heavy metal rings, looked at my son in the mirror from behind him, scissors in hand.
“What grade are you in?” she asked.
“I’m in seventh grade,” he said.
Something clicked inside me, something stirred as I sat on that bench and stared at this suddenly strange boy in the chair, wrapped in a robe.
“He’s in seventh grade?” I thought.
Now, I know this. I know that my 12-year-old son is in seventh grade, his second year of middle school. I know I went to a PTA meeting recently about applying for high schools next year. I know this. And still it came as a shock. I startled slightly at the news.
If I have a son in seventh grade, then how old am I?
This information, about my own age, is also readily at my disposal. In fact, I just had a birthday, and so I know exactly for sure that I am 43. I am long since in the seventh grade, and yet, it seems not so very far away. I remember it clearly, the cheers we sang for student council, the lockers we so excitedly stood in front of and giggled about boys. For my birthday in seventh grade, my friends wrapped my locker in birthday wrapping paper and pasted on it bad school pics of me. I may still have it. We were silly, but just beginning to stress about the big world around us. I got drunk that year on a whim, taking sips of every kind of alcohol in the cabinet when the boy I liked asked out one of my best friends.
Yikes. It occurs to me that what older people always said was true is actually true — that you never really feel as old as you really are. There is no strange dividing line between seventh graders and 70-year-olds that makes them so vastly different. Life experience, of course, can provide some slight hints about what to do and how to act, but often you can only learn from mistakes not to make the same mistakes, so you just do things differently and make different mistakes.
So, then. By seventh grade we are fully formed humans. We are very nearly who we will probably always be, except for the lack of hair in certain areas. As I watched my son bow his cute head forward per the young hairdresser’s request, I felt humbled. I realized as I stared at his freckled face in profile that he was a person in his own right that I could not rule, a person whose path was not mine to decide. Just because I brought him here did not make him mine to control.
Seventh grade.
In the days since the epiphany, the realization that my son really, truly is growing up, he has asked to eat dinner at friends’ houses, to spend the night elsewhere. He has wandered around Brooklyn after school, playing football and doing who knows what with who knows whom. And I realize that it is not for me to say no just because I’d rather he be home safe with me.
“Sorry, mom,” he said recently, when I waffled on whether to let him dine with friends or make him come home.
I came to quickly then and told him there was no need to apologize. I would be just fine.
I realize that, within reason, he will start to make his own rules. I cross my fingers that I have given him guidance enough to make good decisions, but if my own experience is any indication, there will be bouts of bad judgment that will have to be looked back on as lessons learned. And he will have to suffer those setbacks.
And I will have to watch.
Gulp.
