A Graduation of Sorts

It’s Max’s birthday today.  He turns 19.  It shocks me.  This is way past “young teen” to “on the verge of adulthood.” The next birthday is 20, no longer a teenager at all.

It hurts me to think of him leaving, but I’m more or less resigned.  No, not really.  I’m relieved that Covid will keep him here a little longer, at least a year, maybe two.  Johnson and Wales is out of the question for fall.  Denver is still a hotspot, as are we here in the Twin Cities.  The culinary arts program at St. Paul Community College will have to do for now.  We try to make him feel better: “You don’t have to live at home: you can live with Wesley or Henry or Jack!”  But none of them have jobs.  How will this work?

It hurts that he can’t celebrate his birthday the usual way, when we wake up the next morning to towering teenage boys draped all over the couches and the floor. It hurts that he doesn’t have a real graduation ceremony, that he doesn’t get to say goodbye to some of the classmates and friends who’ll be going off to Madison or Los Angeles.  It hurts that we won’t get a picture of him in his cap and gown.

He refuses to participate in the virtual graduation Avalon is offering.  Says he doesn’t want a car parade of friends for his birthday—it will make him feel even worse. 

I wish I could comfort him as I did when he was a child, when all it took was my embrace.  Now his pain and grief are deeper, and I’m not the one who can assuage them.

--

Here’s what we’re doing today:  I’ve ordered two pieces of raspberry cream torte from Café Latte.  The pieces will be massive (they better be, for $7.50 apiece).  I’m off sugar so I’ll just have a bite.  We’ll pick them up curbside.   At dinnertime we’ll order hamburgers from the Groveland Tap.  Max has kept a vegetarian diet for over a year.  Somehow, graduating from high school has given him permission to quit.  I think it was a status thing.

I’ll go get him Persona 5 from GameStop; as much as I loathe video games, they keep him busy and connected to friends when there are few other ways to do so.

We’ll keep working on his room.  Over the weekend, he and F. scraped off the crumbling plaster of the walls, puttied the holes, and sanded the results.  We put in the air conditioner only to realize it was coated with black mold.  The next 30 minutes were spent cleaning out tiny crevices with Q-tips.  Max and F. went to Menards to pick up blackout shades for the windows; the light bothers max in the morning.  All the contents of his room are now scattered through the hallway and dining room and on the table where I often eat breakfast and do work on the computer.
 
Today, we’ll throw up a few patches of paint to test the colors: green and lilac.  The exact colors of the actual lilac bushes just outside his window.  The green is a bright lime—a bit too bold for my taste, but he’s always favored intense colors: red, yellow, orange especially.  Suddenly he’s into bluish-purple, the color of an anime character whose name I can’t remember.

We’ll keep at this through the rest of this week. Then we’ll buy him a bed.  The one he has is pitiful: sagging in the middle where the slats have broken, an actual hole where the spring has poked through the fabric. A shameful reminder of our parental neglect: he’s been begging for a new bed for a year.  There have always been too many other things going on.  Now we have time; but how do we get a bed?  Are furniture stores open?  Safe?  Do we have to buy a mattress online, without ever lying down on it?

At least it’s something.  Not his friends, but a marker, a concrete acknowledgement that he has moved from boy to teen to young man.  A birth-day.  A graduation of sorts.