“I only have six more months to be a kid,” he said. Out of the blue, just standing there in the living room.

What was I doing? Passing through, I suppose, on my way to the next busy-ness, the way it usually goes with me. But I was arrested by the question, and then made a mental calculation: was it six months until his graduation from high school? No, that’s almost (still) a year away.

“How do you feel about that?” he asked.

And then I got it. Six months (nearly) until his birthday. That’s what he meant. He will be eighteen. An adult. No longer a kid.

“How do you feel about that?” he had asked me, and of course it merited answer.

***

There is a right answer to these sorts of questions, I think. Parenting has taught me this much. There’s often an obvious, honest answer–but that doesn’t make it the right one.

For instance, there was the infamous time we were driving somewhere with three children in tow and William, age five, piped up with this doozy: “Daddy, are you going to die someday?”

Not likely a search for existential truths. Not a query demanding statistical probability. Maybe just looking for reassurance.

Bill’s answer: “Sure! I could die anytime!”

It was an honest answer and, to Bill, it was obvious. But maybe not best. Maybe not the right answer, given the circumstances: the age and person of the boy in the backseat.

As with Everett, fifteen years later, standing with me in the living room.

“I only have six more months to be a kid. How do you feel about that?”

***

When I was a girl, I think I imagined that motherhood would magically transform me. I believed I would somehow cease to be a person with her concomitant fears and insecurities, and somehow become a Mother–which meant I would be fully responsible, confident, capable–and also void of personal interest.

This probably says a lot about my mother’s selfless love for me, but it prepared me not at all for the reality, which is that a mother is a person.

And this is pretty much true all of the time.

***

Of course the learning curve, in a very practical way and in most cases, is steep and sure at the beginning. At the beginning, a mother is on demand basically All of the Time. Feeding, changing, feeding again. Trying to coax a little body into sleep.

I remember an afternoon when William was just two weeks old. Bill was at work, my parents had just left, and the newborn in my arms was wailing away at the top of his lungs. I was crying, too–until I realized that probably one of us should stop crying just, you know, to be on top of things. And the one to stop crying was going to have to be me.

So I couldn’t quite be a person in that moment. Not, anyway, the person I wanted to be–or felt like being, anyway.

But things even out soon enough. The challenging terrain of those earliest days gives way, invisibly, incrementally, to a hands-on parenting that contends with new necessaries: 3-square meals and bedtimes, “use your words” and swimming lessons. You’re doing so much for them, needed so much by them, that it truly becomes second nature. Schlepping them, signing forms for them, buying them (endless need) new pairs of shoes.

And there are those conversations, too, uncounted and imperative, that extend from the existential (where do we go when we die) to the fundamental (where do babies come from). These are sometimes challenging. They are often inconvenient. And sometimes they require that we step outside of ourselves in order to be the people our children are needing: people who are unembarrassed, and wide-open honest, and sometimes honestly fearful or grieving or humbly apologetic.

In those moments, it isn’t at all about who I am as a person, but it’s about who they need me to be and the answer they need me to give. And often, appallingly, it’s the far more Real Me that they need than I am comfortable giving away.

Which is fine. The discomfort is totally worth it.

***

Good thing we get this practice, this careful evaluation of them-over-us in these specific kinds of moments. Because, for now, anyway, these kinds of things haven’t gone away.

“I only have six more months to be a kid! How do you feel about that?”

What good, in that instant, would all the honesty be, exactly? How good for him to know how I actually feel? That in that instant, standing there in the living room, I was calculating the months between his eighteenth birthday and his high school graduation, hoping that our time with him at home is just a little bit longer than it might seem, realizing that I have left of this extraordinary life under this roof with us only about–give or take–twelve more months?

Twelve months is no time at all.

So I said to him what I’ve said to all of them, when appropriate, from time to time. And it is the truth: “I am so excited for you.”

To see what you’ll do. To see who you become. To watch you have your own life.

***

“You coming?” That was his question to me as we stood together in the little office at Burlington Aviation.

He was about to go up in the cockpit of a Cessna 172, a single flight lesson that was a Groupon-turned-birthday present for our seventeen-year-old son. Yes, there was to be a flight instructor in the seat next to him, and yes, the boy has logged many hours of time on flight simulators.

But the enterprise was nonetheless a terrifying concept. Despite my love of flying, airplanes remain a terrifying concept. What truths–fundamental or existential–have us consistently flinging things heavy as airplanes–peopled!–into the air?

I had many times contemplated this trip with Everett. This forty-minute drive to Burlington, this son-of-mine-in-the-cockpit-flying-a-plane, the harrowing stories of the fiery demise of far too many small aircraft.

“You coming?”

And he had had to schedule and reschedule the lesson quite a few times. This Thursday, that Tuesday, both of us arranging an afternoon- one of us mentally steeling herself- for this event. But wind, clouds, rain always had us putting it off.

Until that Friday, standing in the office of Burlington Aviation.

The person I felt like being, in that particular moment, was maybe the car-going kind, the kind standing securely on the ground. She was the kind who wanted her seventeen-year-old to be seven again, riding his bike in the cul-de-sac, or maybe playing with a toy airplane in the living room.

That was the kind of person I felt like being, but instead I said,

“Yes.”

I deposited some of my fears on the tarmac and buckled the rest under my seat belt. I sat in the backseat and wore my headset and decided that physics and angels (mostly angels, let’s be honest) are all we need.

Because I’ve always meant to be a brave person. I’ve always wanted to be Everett’s mother, even when I hadn’t met him yet.

Because he is absolutely going to have–is having–his own life, and from the backseat of a Cessna 172, I got to see another part of it.