Out of the Nest and Ready to Fly

Yesterday, my son Alejandro arrived home from UT-Austin for the last college vacation he'll ever enjoy. In May, he graduates and then moves on to a new city and new job.

As his mom, this is my last opportunity to spend time with him at home while I can still claim him as a child, rather than the young man I know he already has become.

Like any kid living at home, he has chores to do (and complain about), and he feels okay about asking me to pay for the gas that will let him visit his friends in Santa Cruz. For this short period of time, he is economically dependent on his family and quite happy to take advantage of parental largesse.

But we're in the countdown phase of the transition to adulthood. He's already married (legally in New York) and even has a credit history. Soon enough he'll have a car and apartment and all the dubious trappings of adult independence like insurance and utility bills.

I know he's ready to take on all of this, and I can't honestly say I'm sorry not to have to worry about tuition bills. But I'm also not quite ready to face the fact that our relationship is undergoing a profound shift.

In future, visits home will be limited by how much vacation he has and what it costs to buy airline tickets (and let me say here that there will always be a parental subsidy for these).

He'll have to negotiate with two sets of parents on where to spend Thanksgiving and Christmas and whether or not he can join us on other trips. His grandparents will also want him to visit them in Chile, and his aunts will want to see him in Long Beach and San Diego.

And, of course, I would be ecstatic if he went to law school in the Bay Area (hint, hint).

But it's not just the prospect of not seeing him as much as I want that saddens me; it's the feeling that I've still not had enough time to enjoy watching him growing up.

As my husband remarked before we had children, "Kids only become interesting around age 18." While I disagree with him on the "interesting" part, it is true that just about the time your kids are willing to talk to you again and treat you like another human being instead of this incredibly irritating, embarrassing creature they call a parent, they're off to college, and someone else is enjoying all the fruits of your labors.

I distinctly remember feeling cheated when a family friend told me how much he had enjoyed a long car trip up to the Sierras with Alejandro when they drove up to join his best friend and the rest of the family at their cabin. "I thought he'd just listen to his iPod," the father of his friend told me, "but we had this great conversation about Fast Food Nation."

Needless to say, I didn't get many of those great conversations. In fact, for several of his teenage years, he kept a sign on his door that read: "Sarcasm Club: Like we'd want you as a member."

The message to parents was clear: 1) Stay out of my room. 2) Leave me alone. 3) And don't talk to me, unless you want a snarky rejoinder.

In fairness, his adolescence wasn't all that bad, despite our first year in Albuquerque, where he found it difficult to connect with kids at his new high school and therefore told me on a daily basis that I had "ruined his life."

We can laugh at that now, knowing that if he hadn't gone to Albuquerque, he wouldn't have met his husband, Nathan.

I look at him today, all grown up and even a bit scholarly when he wears his glasses, and I remember a curly-haired, blue-eyed toddler who had a mischievous sense of humor and the biggest smile I've ever seen. And I feel so much love and gratitude for the joy he has brought me and the gift of seeing him put his tremendous talents to work in so many ways.

My first fledging is out of the nest and ready to fly, and I'm going to love watching him soar away.