Graduation is just over three weeks away. Just a few days left in trimester three. 

***

We’re watching Shelly give birth on Northern Exposure and I start to cry. Not because babies are beautiful (they aren’t) or because I think giving birth is beautiful (nope) but because I’m watching Shelly hold little Miranda Bliss and remembering how grateful I was when they took Callum from me and told me he could be in the newborn room and not with me all night. I was so tired. And wrung out. So, yes, there I was, almost 18 years later, crying because of how guilty I felt about not keeping Callum in the room with me the night he was born. I’ve had almost 18 years to move past this. Granted a hallmark of my anxiety disorder is obsessive rumination, but even for me, this feels like something I should have let go of by now. Bodes well for how long I’ll hang on to every other thing I’ve felt I’ve done wrong while parenting. 

***

There’s a music program at school and I’m tearing up picturing Callum standing on that same stage. All cliches are rooted in truths: where did the time go? So much of it all has felt endless—just a horrific slog. Yet it’s gone so quickly, somehow. It is, indeed, the longest shortest time. 

***

I go down into Callum’s lair and find he’s moved most of his stuff from the play room, where he’s spent years spread out, enjoying the double joy of being an only child in a large house, an entire floor all to himself, into his room. When I question him, he tells me he’s starting to move things in anticipation of moving out. “Now you can have this space back,” he says. I tell him, “We have plenty of other space. And you’ll still be coming home for breaks and other visits.” Right? I mean… RIGHT?!?!?!

***

I’m ordering Callum’s graduation announcements and I keep thinking about that quote about yearbooks from My So-Called Life. 

 “I mean, this whole thing with yearbook — it’s like, everybody’s in this big hurry to make this book, to supposedly remember what happened, but it’s not even what really happened, it’s what everyone thinks was supposed to happen. Because if you made a book of what really happened, it’d be a really upsetting book. You know, in my humble opinion.”

His senior portraits capture him. The real him. Dressed in black, mildly irritated, no smile. I use a picture on the backside of the trip he and I took to Boston the previous summer. You know, the trip where he told me it was probably our last mom and Cal trip together. That one. In the picture he’s covering most of his face. He’s always been himself. He has pushed every single button I have for almost his entire life, but he’s one cool kid. But high school, man. What an upsetting time. Thank god the end is near. 

***

Most of parenting things are good these days. Then there are the moments I remind myself that some animals eat their young. 

***

I start panic buying weird shit that suddenly seems EXTREMELY important to stockpile for college, like flashlights and windbreakers. I don’t think my brain can conceptualize him just living somewhere else. Like, la la la, just his same life but away from me. My brain has decided it’s like preparing for a natural disaster. What if it’s raining super hard? What if power goes out? “You know phones have flashlights,” a friend tells me. I KNOW! But what if his phone is dead? I just need to know he has a flashlight with him. Moving into a campus less than an hour away, tossing him out in the woods all alone…it’s all the same to my brain. 

***

What happens to me with him gone? Will I be out of the loop with music and pop culture and slang? He’s the only reason not every single reference point I have for anything pop culture is solely from the 90s. Or, as he has always likes to point out, the 1900s. I grow old, I grow old. 

***

We’re out to dinner at a Mexican place that Matthew and I love, but Callum rarely goes to with us. The waiter asks what he’d like to drink and Cal says, “I need to see what they have here.” I’m like, “They have sodas and Jarritos.” And the waiter pipes up with “Cervezas.” I do NOT yell, “SIR, THAT MAN IS A CHILD! THAT IS A LITERAL CHILD!” Callum orders Mt. Dew and when the waiter walks away, he says, “No one can ever tell how old I am. No one ever believes me. I’ve always looked older. I must be aging like shit. By 30, I’ll look 60.” Which then reminds me of a story from the fall where he and a friend went to see $uicideboy$ and after the concert his buddy was dying telling us about the “cougar” hitting on Callum. “She was probably in her 20s,” Callum clarifies. “She said she was going to get a beer and did I want one.”

“You should’ve asked her to bring you a milk,” I say.

***

“I’m going to show you a monkey video,” he says. He shows me thousands of monkey videos. Monkeys in clothes, wearing backpacks, sipping from straws, doing their weird little monkey-child things. I have told him repeatedly I’d rather not be a grandparent to a monkey some day. “But listen to the song they used. I still can’t handle it.”  It’s “You are my Sunshine.” I used to sing it to him when he was little, while we’d listen to the Anne Murray version, and I’d rock him. “Please don’t sing the next part, Mommy Holling,” he’d beg me, not understanding how middle names work and that him being Callum Holling did not mean I was Mommy Holling. He’d cry if I sang the verse about hanging my head and crying. Almost 18 and he still can’t bear to hear it. 

***

I learn that Callum’s bestie will be spending the summer in Boston. They will be at college together, so I’m sure he’ll be bummed to not have her around for the summer, but it’s okay. My first thought is how cool for her. My second thought is super selfishly now I’ll get more time with him without her here. My third thought is oh shit, will he want to go there for the summer? Which frankly would be fine—it’s our second home, we have tons of friends there, he knows how to navigate the city. But now I’m panicked I will get even less time with him than I’d thought. Best case scenario: we get one more mom and Cal trip to Boston together, despite him telling me those were probably over.

***

We’re going to the opening night of the Friends of the Library book sale. Callum tells me what he’d like me to keep an eye out for, as we’ll get separated at some point there. He wants books on Scandinavian or Germanic mythology. music theory, the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal, Stoicism, Aristotle, and Plato. “I’m interested in Abu Ghraib,” he tells me, “because of what I’ve learned about the Milgram Experiment on cooperation in something inhumane.” I know I’m biased, but good lord, my smart kid is so interesting. I’m like, I’ll definitely keep my eyes out for all that highbrow stuff while I’m looking for graphic novels and Buffy the Vampire Slayer books. 

***

I’m going to miss going downstairs to do something and having him tell me to come listen to some music he’s working on. Have I mentioned that my smart kid is so cool and interesting?

***

Clementine: This is it, Joel. It’s going to be gone soon.
Joel: I know.
Clementine: What do we do?
Joel: Enjoy it.

–Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind