8/21/19 Feelings On The First Day Of High School?

    Life is kind of a bittersweet pill.  The more success you achieve, usually, the farther one is driven from his loved ones.  It is almost a catch-22 that you can have it all, but at the cost of your youth.  I am mostly being caught in the moment, but it felt kind of empty dropping off Javalina at a new school, Boy meanwhile is in Dallas enjoying some convention with his GF and at age 25, why shouldn't he, if school has not started?  Wife of course, working on the other side of that sacrificial role, is 200 miles away working her way up the ladder of unguaranteed promises and possible future riches, but again, all while sacrificing today.
    Javalina is a great kid and he seemed excited and nervous enough about the whole starting in a new school, but I also felt a difference.  Again, on the one hand it is a pain in the butt dropping him off, but in a couple of years, this one will be driving and then I won't be needed for anything more than a small ATM role.  Meanwhile, we are supposed to be happy and excited about this and I know that it only goes faster because they are smart kids and that is the progression of life.  It just seems to take so much of our lives to do everything for our kids just to basically prepare them to leave.
    The flipside of the coin, when a kid never leaves though can be even worse, if they are born mentally slow or unable to cope with the world on the world's terms.  I know that we all want the best for our babies, so big picture, I am glad my boys are succeeding and moving on, but sometimes it feels as if it is all going way too fast.
    Like it or not, the football season already started, so it goes like clockwork, one game a week and by the time the season ends, we are already past Halloween and looking at Thanksgiving.  That usually means 2-3 more weeks of school and Christmas vacation followed by the start of the new year.  This is just Javalina.  Boy is supposed to be in his last full semester, so we will be looking forward to the spring, when he tells us, he should be graduating.  Sadly, he has tentative plans of moving out in another year after graduation, once he can save some money.
    I can only hope that Wife has finished her obligations working away from home and that she can come back at that point.  I would love it if she could join me to watch Javalina playing his football games.  They seem long and tedious while looking at his schedule, but they are a blip in time and will be gone before we know it.  It was just a couple months ago I was working with a beast of an 8th grader trying to make him stronger by introducing him to weights and protein shakes.  Today, fast forward and I have before me this "little guy" standing with all those upperclassmen and I can't help but feel like we have less than four years to make him the best version of himself for the college years.