When did this happen?

(Note: I moved this post up from 9.26.2006 to mark Master's seventeenth birthday.)

He didn't ask my permission. He simply grew up... an outcome for which I had steeled myself early: "We are letting them go from the moment they arrive in our lives," I would intone, as if I were some sage Earth Mother-type with wisdom to spare.

Yeah, right. Well, I'm no Earth Mother. And while my words may have been letting him go, my heart was having none of it.

There, in my heart, he will always be some shimmering morph of the beautiful, easy-natured baby he was and the good man he has become.

Later...
What is it about fall that makes me feel this way?

Is it something about the butter-yellow sun in the impossibly blue sky? Or the way the light slants through the windows at cool-weather angles? Or is it the smell of burning leaves? The feel of flannel sheets?

What is it about fall that makes me feel much too young to be the mother of a man? That makes me feel that it all passed too quickly? That I'd like another decade, please?

Wait. Stop. I want to get off.

Someone bring me the little boy who wore a pillowcase clipped with a clothespin and declared that he was Batman... then Superman... then a Ninja Turtle. Someone find that new reader who kept books under his pillow, that new writer who clasped his fat pencil in a starfish hand. Someone go get that boy who couldn't swim across the pool, was destined to be the world's oldest guppy.

Please. Someone.

We can't possibly have travelled this far already... can we?