Apr 16, 2015 3 min read

Tomorrow, my son will turn 20. He’ll celebrate by getting all dressed up and going to a dance at his university. Maybe Sunday he’ll stop by here to blow out some candles. He’ll play with the dog for a while, will snoop around in the fridge, and then he’ll be on his way.

It will take all my self-control not to order him to sit down and listen to me talk.

I like my teachable moments, and have exploited hours and hours worth of them over the years. The dialogue about drugs and alcohol and sex started when he was 4 – OK, not 4, but early. As my son entered middle school, I used all those hours driving him to and from football practice as teaching time.

If it were physically possible, I would have unscrewed the top of his head and poured the preaching in there. Don’t drink and drive, don’t text and drive, don’t try hard drugs even once.

How’d he put up with me for two decades?

Because he’s patient and has a big, soft and gentle heart. He’s a smart boy who understood the lessons after the first 10 times he heard them, but he always listened.

He played football for eight years, with daily practices. Do the math: This poor kid was stuck in the car with the most mothery of mothers, and he never once told me to be quiet. All that teaching happened in a blue Honda Pilot. Last winter, I finally traded it in. Whoever bought it will be driving with the echoes of a million warnings and lessons bouncing around her head.

I picture what I must have looked like all these years. In the movie “Almost Famous,” Frances McDormand plays the mother of the young man who goes on tour with a rock band. She keeps telling him, “Don’t do drugs.”

In the film, it’s played for laughs, the comically overbearing mother. But what mother doesn’t feel the need to tell her kid that every chance she gets?

We raise our boys to be independent and separate from us. And when they become that, we worry. After all the years and teaching, the hardest lesson has been the one I’ve had to learn.

Let go.

He’s doing well in college, has several jobs, looks healthy and happy. Last winter, in a regressive slip-up, I started in about the dangers of texting and driving.

“You can stop talking to me about that now, Mama,” he said. It went against every last instinct, but I shut up.

During the school year, we see each other for lunch a few times a month. We talk mostly adult to adult, but it’s hard not to see a little boy there. The eyes are as blue as ever and his hair as soft and curly. The last time, he talked about his lighting design class.

A friend who happened to be in the same restaurant remarked that I got “all bedazzled” when Coop walked in.

Yes. My heart leaps up when I see him, this boy of mine, every time, even after 20 years.

Beth Dolinar can be reached at cootiej@aol.com.