Middle place

A week after my son became a bar mitzvah, he notified me that saying “I love you” in the middle school drop-off line while the car door was open would no longer be permitted. 

“But,” he added, “you can say it when the door is still closed.”

Heartbreaking rejection aside, this child has been a joy to raise. His kindness and willingness to lend a helping hand have earned him recognition at school. He’s smart and observant, with a sense of humor that often takes me by surprise. He works hard at the things he cares about, and he cares deeply about those he loves.

I saw all these pieces of him that day at synagogue, watching with awe as his size 10.5 Nikes stepped up to the podium for the first prayer. He was all nerves, but as the service went on something clicked and–miracle of miracles–he seemed to be enjoying himself.

Apparently, his journey to manhood continued from the bima (pulpit) to my Honda Pilot, where he opened the door and bounded off before I could get a word out. I watched him greet a teacher and offer up fist bumps to his friends, debating whether to cry or laugh at this weird middle place in which we seemed to have found ourselves. The car behind me honked and I was forced back into the cutthroat world of the school drop-off line. At least some things never change.

At 13, my son still needs me, though he can’t seem to decide whether he wants me. Or rather, how much of me is acceptable to want. On a first trip to the mall with some friends, he made sure I knew I wasn’t invited inside–I was good for the ride and the pocket money only–but then he sent me photos of the Pokémon cards he was thinking of buying and the Japanese candy he tried (“Mom, I saved one for you!”). He didn’t want me there, but he still wanted me to share the experience.

Our nighttime routine has morphed from reading together (age 11) to watching TV together (age 12) to our current practice of him disappearing into the basement to FaceTime with friends while playing Minecraft. Before bedtime I remind him to take his medicine and brush his teeth; he rolls his eyes, and then asks if I will help him clip his toenails and do I want to see the Minecraft world he’s been working on? Glimpses of my little boy as we hurtle into adolescence.

Every morning I beg him to get out of bed. The process starts at 7 a.m., then I drop back in at 7:15 and 7:25. By 7:35 I’m throwing balled up socks at his face, not sure if the ones I’ve found on his floor came from the clean pile or yesterday’s feet. And yet there’s no other time of day that he looks so much like he did when he was little than when he’s asleep. I look at his face and see all the stages of him in that moment of quiet before he tells me to get lost and I’m back to the sock tossing. Inevitably the dog strolls in and we all end up on the floor for some morning snuggles. 

Can I say with certainty that his bar mitzvah was the line of demarcation between this fleeting childhood and looming adolescence? I cannot. But I don’t think it is a stretch to say that the experience taught him that he is capable of doing hard things. It made him stand up just a little taller. If one of the outcomes from that day is an awareness that he’s ready and able to do some things without me, I’ll count that as a win, even if it means I can’t say “I love you” in front of his friends. At least he knows he can count on me to say it when it’s just us.

Alyssa Latala is the Chief Experience Officer at Am Shalom in Glencoe. When she’s not at the temple or asleep, she can be found driving children to baseball, watching children play baseball, and feeding children a second dinner after baseball.