This week I've felt it heavy on me, especially on the edge of sleep and waking. It does wake me. Solveig will finish high school in two years. If i get into the weeds it's more than two years. There is another month and change left in her 10th grade year, then we have two months of summer. That gives me a little more pause for calm. But two years is so close.
Solveig does not seem so much like sixteen. She is. I'm in denial. The change started for me after we left Vietnam at the end of her 7th grade year, then summer in Vietnam, then back to Estes Park Colorado in August 2023, then home schooling Solveig and Sage there for two months, then the move to Falls Church, Virginia, where Solveig started 8th grade a day or two before Halloween. And that's when it hit.
First, an old foreign service colleague who's daughter is the same age as Solveig invited her to a Halloween party. Half the girls there were decked out in makeup trying out sexy little costumes for the first time. I hope for the first time. I don't think Solveig had a good time. I need to mention that Solveig wnet to Marry Ellen Henderson Middle School. Shin reached out to parents somehow before we arrived asking who would be willing to do some play dates with Solveig before she started school so she would feel more comfortable with the transition. I don't know if Shin used the word play date. Maybe. It felt like that. Even if she did not, the response was awkward, hesitant. Girls at that age are very discerning about who they chose to be seen with, hand out with, be friends with. Parents don't make arrangements. I think Solveig met one group of girls at a cafe, one or two of them were also at the Halloween party, and that was it. She didn't do anything with them after that. We also connected her to an old friend from before the three years in Vietnam. No spark. The connection fizzled.
Solveig's first two months of 8th grade looked very lonely to me. She closed up. She came home directly from school, sketched, did homework, looked out the window. She developed acne and his behind her hair. Most importantly, she started listening to music. She got earpods, (not my idea. I hate those things.) and plugged in and started becoming a discerning teenage girl building her identity around music and anime. American middle school identity building.
Time marches on. It's hard to fathom that was almost three years ago now. She is not closed up anymore. She emerged from that shell she created, cur cled into, then emerged as a teenage girl. In two years she will be an adult. Legally. And I am crumbling out of middle age into my later years. Sometimes we wake up, and the world seems like it is turning to ashes.
