I’m at a loss on how to start a post after two months of no writing…do I give excuses about how busy I’ve been, a synopsis of what I’ve been up to, or just ignore it and jump right in? Hmmmmm…I think I’ll just jump right in.

January in our house is a much calmer month than any other month of the year. Yes, school has started back, and yes, basketball season is in full force (2-3 games per week, which means 4-6 games of JV and Varsity), but H’s school has three weeks of “winterim”, which means no regular classes or homework. The 11th and 12th graders have three week internships off campus (sometimes overseas), and the 9th and 10th graders stay on campus and sign up for special interest classes. H is taking “Music from the 60’s”, “Designing Women going Green” (green architecture), and “Extra Extra Read all about it” (writing the winterim version of their school newspaper). What a difference this makes! She has very little homework, a couple of quizzes, and she is taking classes of her choosing that she is genuinely interested in.

The biggest dilemma we have this month is Winter Formal…her all girl’s school has a winter dance at the beginning of February, and they have to come up with “dates”. Not a problem if you’re “going out” with someone, but most of her friends and classmates don’t have a special someone to invite. So the scrambling begins in December to ask someone who…

• 1. Won’t get the wrong idea (i.e. think it means more than it does)
• 2. Will be fun to have along with their friends (not too shy),
• 3. Won’t be too clingy, (so they can talk to their girlfriends),
• 4. Will look good in pictures (hopefully tall enough so they can wear heels),
• 5. Will say “yes” (it’s awful if you ask someone who says “no”)
• 6. Isn’t already on someone else’s ‘list’ (another classmate wanted to ask him and gets mad that you did first)
• 7. Isn’t someone’s “ex” (even though they’re not together anymore she has permanent ‘dibs’)

After many, many text messages to her friends, she decided on the perfect boy to ask. He fit all the prerequisites (especially #2 and #4), although #7 was a little questionable, but the “ex” is the one who introduced them, so she asked, he said he’d be happy to go and it’s on.

The next hurdle is THE GROUP. The actual dance is two hours long, so you have dinner before and after-parties afterward. So they divide up in smaller groups to get together beforehand for pictures, then dinner, then the dance, then the after-party. Finding the right “group” is crucial. You want to be with your girlfriends, but if their dates don’t know each other, it’s very awkward. And there’s always the group that just seems to keep getting bigger, so they have to limit the size, and invariably someone gets left out. It’s a situation just fraught with drama. She has a little less than four weeks until the dance…no group plans are definite…so I’m sure there will be more to the story. Until then…

Almost since the day my daughter was born, I’ve been watching her leave. Every time it happens, I get this heavy, empty feeling in my heart. The first time was when her grandparents in Florida took her for a few days while J and I went on a long weekend trip when she was 16 months old. For the first day or two that we were gone, we were consumed with missing her. We took pictures with us, and even took a video tape of her so that we could watch “H.. movies” while we were gone. I’ll never forget the day we came home and my in-laws brought her back to us. I ran up to her with my arms outstretched…she looked at me, and burrowed her head into her grandma’s chest. My mother-in-law still relishes the feeling that gave her, but I still feel the pain and guilt that it took 4 days for my daughter to be more comfortable with my mother-in-law than with me.

I kept her close by for several months after that. Then, I enrolled her in one day a week of preschool. She was 2 years old, and loved every minute of it. I think being an only child meant she loved anything she did that involved other kids. I could never just leave her there, though. I would drop her off, and stand there for a few minutes waiting for her to cry, or beg me not to go, but my social butterfly daughter would always run off, without even looking over her shoulder. So I would go out to the car, and then promptly go back in to the “Observation room”…a little closet with a one way mirror that I could look through to watch her play.

Then, as the years went by, there were more occasions for her to leave me…dance lessons, kindergarten, sleepovers, summer camp, etc. It was never easy to watch her go, but as the years went by, I learned to live with it. But nothing, I mean NOTHING, prepared me for this morning.

There will be more occasions in the future for her to leave: college, work, travel, marriage, etc. It will always hurt watching her go. But I know that she has wonderful life experiences to look forward to. I will pray for her safety and her happiness. But I guess we have to let go. A little bit.

I pulled up to the gym to pick H up from basketball. She had been up until midnight the night before, cramming for two tests that she had that day. Then, after school she had an hour workout with the D1 trainers, lifting weights and sprinting outside, then an hour with the “Dr. Dish” working on her shooting. She was red faced and looked absolutely exhausted.

“Can I drive home?” (She has her permit, and ALWAYS wants to drive home)

“You look so tired, why don’t you just let me drive you.”

“No, I promise, I’m fine.”

So I got out and walked around to the passenger seat. The side that has no brake pedal, even though I stomp on it whenever she’s driving. It drives her crazy. There’s also no steering wheel. It’s a problem when you’re a control freak mom who is trying her hardest to let go a little bit. But nonetheless, I think she needs all the practice she can get, so she drives me around a lot.

Usually I can’t help but coach her through the whole thing.

“Slow down!”
“Pull out a little bit more!”
“Look both ways.”
“Don’t turn so soon.”
“Look out!!!!”

But she actually does fine. She’s very conscientious, remembers all the rules of the road, and if anything, she’s too careful.

So we make the 3 mile drive home. When we turned onto the road 1/2 a mile from our house, I looked down for a minute to check my email. I looked up a few seconds later, and as we went around a curve the car kept going straight.

“H…., H…., H…., WATCH OUT!!!”

And she swerved the car back onto the road, apologizing over and over again. She immediately pulled over and started crying.

“What just happened?”

“I DON’T KNOW”, she sobbed.

We sat there for a few minutes while she calmed down.

“Did you fall asleep?”

“I DON’T KNOW”, she said. “I don’t think so. I just kind of zoned out.”

So in my most gentle, motherly voice, I asked her what she thought could have happened if I hadn’t been there.

“I could have hit a mailbox, or a telephone pole.”

I said, “Or, what about a small child walking down the road?”

And with that, she became absolutely hysterical. We sat there for awhile, and I told her stories-including how I pulled over and took a nap once when I was driving home from UT, until she calmed down enough to tell me that she didn’t want to drive the rest of the way home. We switched places, and drove home in silence.

The good news…She didn’t hit anything (or anyone), and she still wanted to drive the next day.

And most important…I think she’ll think twice about getting behind the wheel when she’s tired.

When H was in 5th grade, one of the boys in her class “asked her out”. Of course, in 5th grade, they don’t go anywhere. But you wouldn’t know that from listening to them talk.

“Well, Brandi was going out with Billy, but then he broke up with her and started going out with Anne”, or “John asked me out, but I really like George, so I said No.”

Well, when the boy (who she has known since preschool) “asked her out”, she wasn’t sure she was “ready”. So she explained that to him. He decided he would wait until she was ready. So at every birthday party or play practice for the next few weeks, he would pout in the corner, because he was sad. All H’s friends told her she was breaking his heart, so she relented and said “yes”.

Suddenly, her buddy, who up until this moment was a friend she was very comfortable around, became her “boyfriend” and they stopped talking. “Everything changed,” she said, and wished aloud that she could go back to the way it was before. The straw that broke the camel’s back was the day, after the middle school assembly, that he grabbed her hand and held it for the entire 25 foot walk from the auditorium to their classroom. She was embarrassed, uncomfortable, and decided that she needed to break up with him.

A few weeks later, a boy she’d had a crush on since 3rd grade (who had transferred to another school), “asked her out”. He actually had the guts to call her on the phone (our house phone, since she didn’t have a cell phone yet), and ask her if she would go out. The funny thing was, they didn’t speak before that, nor did they speak after that. But she was “going out with him”. She found out through a friend a couple of weeks later that he was “breaking up with her”. I don’t know if she’s spoken to him since.

So, with that vast amount of experience under her belt, she decided she was “not going to date boys anymore”. She said, “When I date boys, everything changes, so I would rather just be friends.”

That worked great for a couple of years. She played basketball, ran track, and hung out with her girlfriends, so she didn’t really have time for boys. Then, in 7th and 8th grade, to her dismay, all her girlfriends started getting interested in boys. She kept up her mantra of “not dating”, and counseled her friends through their various crushes. I think that if she had not gone to the same school for Kindergarten through 8th grade, boys might have interested her a little bit earlier, but in her mind, the boys at her school were like her brothers, and did not interest her in the slightest.

Fast forward to high school. New school, new faces, and boys are entering the equation. Only one problem (in her mind, not ours!). She’s at an all-girl’s school, and playing basketball, so she’s at school from 7:30 a.m.-6 p.m. every day (unless there’s a game, which puts her there until 7:30-8:00). Not a lot of time to get out and meet the boys. All fine, except there is a winter formal at her school, and the girls have to find dates.

After school started last fall, they began having freshman “mixers”. H would get together with a few girls to get dressed, and go en masse to the party. When I would ask how it went, she always said, “great”, but she never mentioned meeting anyone. Until the last party before the holidays. One of the boys she had met at the homecoming dance asked for her phone number. So they began texting. She was toying with the idea of asking him, but had never done anything like that, and didn’t really know how she was going to do it, when one of her new friends asked who she was going to invite. She told her she was thinking about this boy, and the friend said, “ooohhhh”, and looked disappointed. H asked who she was going to invite and she said she was thinking about the same boy.

So H said, “Oh, no, you go ahead and invite him. Seriously. I don’t want a boy to come between our friendship. I’ll probably just invite someone from my old school.”

And she came home and cried.

She didn’t want to invite any of her old friends, she really wanted to invite this boy. Never mind that the dance was three months away.

“Who knows who you’ll meet between now and then,” I said.

“No one,” she said, “it’s winter break, and then basketball, so there’s NO ONE!”

Enter DRAMA into our lives.

I will say that this issue has been resolved, but I’m going to have to finish writing it tomorrow. It’s late, and part of my new Year’s Resolution is to get off the computer at a decent hour and spend time with my hubby.

More tomorrow. TTFN!