Momentous

M played his last baseball game of his elementary/middle school years last night. Maybe it was his last baseball game ever, if he decides not to play in high school. I remember noticing somewhere around the preschool years that lasts began to outnumber firsts--the last time your baby crawls, the last new tooth, the last time he says "skabetti"--and yet lasts were so much more elusive; you rarely knew when a last was a last until after the fact.

Now that M is in his teenage years, I sense that the lasts are going to come flying at us like balls in a batting cage (so, too, no doubt, will new firsts; some of which I don't want to think about right now).

M graduates from eight grade in a little over a week. It will be the first (if you don't count preschool graduation) of hopefully many graduations. I'm really excited for what high school has in store for him, and I'm pretty ready to be done with some of the headaches that come with middle school (done for one year anyway, before E and Z start). But still I can't help feeling the bitter-sweetness of this moment--M moving on from the school where he's spent the better part of nine years of his life. NINE years (that's 64.2 percent of his years so far). It feels momentous (to me anyway; when I ask M about how he feels, he responds, in typical 14-year-old fashion: "I don't really care.").

I don't really know what to say about this all...or even what to think about it. I'm too much in the moment to really process and reflect. Instead, I think I'll leave you with the poem I wrote on the occasion of M's first baseball practice, when he was in second grade.

First Practice
I glance up
from my book
slumped on the
hard corner of
the bleachers
to see bat smack
ball hit floor bounce
into the black
glove we brought
home less than
24 hours ago.
Milo's eyes,
astonished,
meet mine,
my arm reaches
out, thumbs-up.
We leave the
gym into blue
sky day. Him,
ecstatic; me, terrified
my Saturdays will
be swallowed whole.

Maybe I need to write a poem for his last baseball game...if it is the last.