Simon is 16 now, and he's a licensed driver. I'm happy that he is, to the extent that driving unlocks a lot of potential for him in terms of jobs, and hopefully social interaction. I didn't get my license until I was almost 20, which was not great. Part of the reason to push him toward being licensed was so that he could drive himself to school. Because his school is very small and serves the entire district, they ordinarily provide transportation through a private car service, and that service is suss and shitty. I'm more comfortable with him driving himself. Unfortunately, insuring him costs about $1,500 a half, which I'm not excited about.
Last year, the new school was far more positive than his experience at the school with 3,000 other kids. It turns out that when they can take the time to understand how he learns, they confirm that he is in fact a pretty smart kid. There are way less social opportunities, and that's true in terms of the good and the bad. And he doesn't have to worry about having a shitty theater teacher.
He will go to his "regular" high school for one class at the end of the day, which is another reason that the car really helps. He's driving an awfully nice (relatively speaking) hand-me-down too, in the form of an almost-6-year-old Model Y. It's got a lot of dings and it rattles a lot, but I'm confident in its reliability. Not sure he really understands how great that is, and I'm not sure how to teach him. My hope is that all of the volunteering shifts he's been picking up at Give Kids The World help him to understand how good his circumstances are.
Still, I don't look forward to the year. He was getting better about being self-reliant in academics, but it was still a source of great stress for us last year. It didn't help that I was not working. And there's a small insurance discount if he has a B average, which he missed by one letter grade last year. I'm not sure that will motivate him.
There's also a small part of me that realizes that he's hurtling toward adulthood at an insane pace. It makes me anxious because I don't know how good of a job I'm doing at preparing him for life, and also because we are practically running out of "fun" time with him. Granted, he doesn't really want to be around us on vacations, but I want us to have some solid memories. We're starting to look at options for a serious vacation next summer, at the scale of our Europe trip (which might be another Europe trip).
I know, I write a lot about the passage of time lately. Feels like everything comes back to that.
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