Goodbyes and Hello to New Adventures

The end of the semester is drawing near and we are all wrapping up final assignments/projects and hoping to get them completed early so we can get a start on the Christmas season.  However, my mind has been elsewhere lately.  On Monday, I took my son Mack down to Milwaukee to drop him off to ship off to the Air Force.  (Thank you thank you thank you for the moral support and driving skills while a mama had a meltdown to my/our very very very awesome, magnificent and outstanding friend who accompanied us.  I love you to the moon and back for being there; knowing the right things to say to keep the conversation positive and provide us with laughter on what might have otherwise been a real downer of a trip!)  Mack stayed in a hotel on Monday night, did his final “stuff” – height and weight check, contract signing and sworn in to active duty – at the Military Entrance Processing Station (MEPS) on Tuesday morning.  By noon on Tuesday, I received a text from him that he was on his way to the airport to fly down to San Antonio.  Relief knowing that his crazy metabolism did not cause him to lose too much weight overnight and he made the minimum.  I personally have no clue where he got that from because I definitely do not suffer from an overactive metabolism myself!  Many texts later, after 10pm at night, he told me he was in San Antonio, on the bus to Basic Training.  Heading into 8 weeks – 44 working days - of getting his butt kicked for a kid who grew up with the most easy going mom with very few rules and a lot of love.  I am sure he can count on one hand how many times I have actually yelled at him in the past 19 years.  Tuesday afternoon I received a phone call from him and it was great to hear his voice.  He sounded good and said it was not as bad as he expected – so far – that no one was too mean … so far.  Though I understand this is called Zero Week and the worst is upcoming over the next two weeks.  At the point I spoke to him, he had not yet gotten his head shaved, hair he has not cut for almost a year which has turned into this crazy curly thick mess usually hidden under a knit beanie type hat worn even in summer, hair which he figured at least added one pound to his weight.

My son signed into the Air Force for 6 years, so although we will fly to Texas and see him at his Graduation from Basic Training, he will be off to Air Force Tech School immediately after that (not sure where, but not likely close to home) and then stationed somewhere (hopefully) fabulous so that he can start the adventure of real life.  He will likely make a career out of this, meaning it is highly unlikely he will ever be back home for longer than a few weeks of leave, and it is unlikely he will ever call Green Bay, Wisconsin his home again.  As I am typing this, I am shedding a few tears at that thought.  If you are reading this and your children are still young, believe me when I say “you’re gonna miss this.”  What led up to his decision to join the military was not an easy road.  Both of my sons (and my daughter) are extremely intelligent.  Mack probably has a genius IQ.  However, if the shortest distance between two points is a straight line, Mack will zig-zag and take the long way around to get there.  He could score 100% on exams in high school, but refused to do homework because he felt it was a waste of time if he already knew and understood the material.  I have a crystal clear memory of sitting in the parking lot of West High School on an early morning in the Fall of 2009, after practically dragging him out of bed to get him to go to school, both of us crying.  I was asking him to tell me what I could do to help him, because as a parent I truly needed to help him to be successful and have a successful future, and whatever I was doing at that point clearly was not working.  So Mack went into several different alternative programs that he was probably far too intelligent for (night school, CESA) and did what he had to.  When he told me he wanted to drop out of the CESA program, I fought as hard as I could to get him into the GED2 program at West which would allow him to study for and take the GED/HSED tests fully paid by the school district and still receive a West High Diploma.  We knew this along with the other alternative programs meant he would not have a GPA on his high school transcripts, something a four year college would not accept unless he went to a 2 year school, such as NWTC.  He completed and passed all of the GED tests with honors (I believe this a 95% or higher score on each test) within 4 weeks.  We initially discussed him attending NWTC, however, as a student there myself, I knew that meant a lot of homework.  Since he was not exactly on board with this whole homework situation, he brought up his desire to join the military.  Since he was very young he had thought of being in the military, but now he was really going to do it. After investigating several branches of the military, he chose the Air Force.  As a parent, I asked him over and over if he was sure this is what he wanted to do.  Over the past months leading up to him leaving, each time he “wanted to talk” to me, I had concerns that he had changed his mind.  However, he committed to it and he has followed through… and now as I am writing this he is about to endure the worst 8 weeks of his life, yet I know he understands it is all worth it.  It seems like the past 19 years were as short as one day, and suddenly you are all grown up.  Son, although I miss you like only a mother could miss a child (feels something like my heart being ripped out of my chest when I am folding up your Pokemon blanket you have slept with since you were 6 years old and putting it away in a closet),  you make me proud and I love you. 

"So many people live within unhappy circumstances and yet will not take the initiative to change their situation because they are conditioned to a life of security and conformity, which may appear to give one peace of mind, but in reality nothing is more damaging to the adventurous spirit within a man than a secure future.  The very basic core of a man's living spirit is his passion for adventure.  The joy of life comes from our encounters with new experiences, and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day, to have a new and different sun."   -  Christopher McCandeless, "Into the Wild"