Lizzie, who made it happen.  Who imagined this night for herself.  Found the dress.  Got her nails done.  Researched a hair style.  Made a hair appointment.  Did her make-up.  Had an idea that showing up at Prom on the back of a motorcycle would be ever-so-cool.  Asked her brother. Navigated that space between excitement and anxiety, self-confidence and insecurity.  Ate pizza without getting even a speck on the dress!

And Jackson.  Older brother extraordinaire.  Who gave up part of an evening (an evening when his girlfriend was performing in a big show).  Who understood the importance of this silly thing.  Who granted a wish with grace and aplomb. Who managed to navigate that space between careful and go-for-it.

Really, guys, no mother’s day present needed.  This is it.

Very few words necessary here.

And things are heating up here.  After a marathon Prom-dress shopping experience — which, thank you whatever gods may be — I was involved in only at the tail end — we’ve got the dress.  And it is gorgeous.  Yesterday (in between track practice and helping to officiate a middle school meet), Lizzie went to a nail salon and got a french manicure.  This afternoon she picks up the dress and then goes to the hair salon.   I can’t imagine what all this would be like if Lizzie wasn’t driving.

But back to the dress.  It is a cerulean blue strapless, fitted, flouncy-hemmed ballgown.  I think Cinderella wore it last.  It’s breath-taking.  And for me, even more breath-taking because of the surprise.  Lizzie doesn’t ever wear dresses.  She owns not a single dress.  The last time she wanted to wear a dress was when she was three.

But she said yes to this dress.

She said yes to Prom.  And she is doing all this — the dress, nails, hair, make-up — not to please a boy (or girl).  Like a lot of kids who go to Prom these days, she does not have a date.  She is doing this to please herself.  She is doing this because it’s fun, an experiment in girlyness, a subculture with which she has little experience. She is doing this because she is an independent spirit.

I don’t know when I’ve ever felt prouder.

I expected big (and good changes):  No ferrying her to school in the morning.  No stopping mid-sentence to drive in to pick her up in the afternoon. No shifting plans because she had to stay late or a practice was canceled  or she wanted to hang out with a friend.  No sitting around on Saturday night waiting for the text that the movie was out and she was ready to be picked up.  No being on call.

Her license meant my freedom.  I knew that would happen.

What I didn’t fully grasp was that her license meant her freedom – and in ways far more significant than mere auto independence.

What I didn’t expect was this change of attitude, this quantum leap of maturity, this (almost) perpetually sunny mood.  But seeing it, living in the midst of it (oh so happily), I understand completely.  It’s not just freedom to get in the car and go to Safeway at 8 pm to buy a bag of shredded coconut so she can bake cookies for the track team.  It’s the freedom to not have to ask us.  Not to have to ask us for a ride, yes.  But more important, not to have to ask for permission. Not to have to explain.  Not to have a make a plea, ask a favor.  It’s the freedom to be spontaneous.

She drove herself to go prom dress shopping last weekend.  Our past shopping excursions have been, as anyone who’s read My Teenage Werewolf or various posts on this blog, shall we say, harrowing.  She takes forever.  I am impatient.  She feels pressure. One or another of us – okay, me – loses it.  This time she went solo, spent two full afternoons to scope out everything and went back to the same store three times (I would never have done that).  And, oh, by the way:  She found a dress. (More on this later.)

Now mornings are glorious around here.  When I had to drive her, it was my responsibility to wake her and get her moving.  Anyone who has ever tried to wake a sleeping teenager for the purpose of getting to school on time knows that this is hard and dirty work.  Well, it is my task no longer.  All of a sudden, after almost 12 years of not being able to wake up and get out the door without a hassle, she wakes herself up just fine and has not been late to school yet.

She’s driving me sane.

In a word:  Yes.

In two words: Driver’s license.

That’s right.  I am now the mother of a teen driver.  And I don’t say that with trepidation.  I say it with pride.  Lizzie is a great driver:  careful but not skittish, attentive but not anxious, assured but not overconfident.  Focused.  If she’d approached high school with this intensity of interest, this level of commitment and energy, she’d be valedictorian.  If she kept her room half as clean as she keeps the car, we’d have almost nothing to fight about. And wouldn’t that be a shame?

So life has changed.  Lizzie drives herself to and from school.  For the first time in two decades, I don’t have to plan morning work-outs or afternoon meetings around a kid’s school schedule.  I hardly know what to do with myself!  (Well, actually, I do. I went to a water exercise/ deep water running class twice last week, a class I was never before able to attend.)

She texted the day after her first day driving to school to see if I wanted to meet her some place for lunch. Of course I dropped everything and drove down the hill.  My grown-up girl who makes lunch dates. Two nights ago, mid-dinner prep, I sent her on a grocery store run because I forgot onions.  And it wasn’t a chore for her.  It was a thrill.  Last night she drove herself to and from her very first job: food prep for a Salvadorian restaurant.

The light at the end of the tunnel is getting brighter and brighter.  I think it’s the headlights of her car.

Success – for her and oh-so-many years ago, for me — is defined by crafting (or lucking into) your own experience that, while it touches and occasionally interacts with what your family is doing, is its own separate world.  It is finding (or being found by) and hanging out with cute guys — in Lizzie’s case, the sons of the hotel manager, a local fisherman, a boy on the beach.  (In my case, Wayne the pool boy.) It is a long stroll at midnight on the sand under the crescent moon with your cool brothers as chaperones not your parents. It is wearing a wristband that identifies you as over 18 even though you’re not quite, which means you can be served (and not carded) at the cantina.  It is being befriended, taken into the fold by a group of fun-loving middle-aged Canadian women who treat you like a younger sister rather than a child.  It is wearing a two-piece suit you KNOW you look good in.  It is feeling your oats.  It is being daring but still being safe.

For me as an adult, the vacation’s success is measured differently:  kayaking by myself around the inlet, the quiet, the tropical breeze, the sense that this was all there was for that moment; dancing cheek-to-cheek with my husband, poolside, like we’re at the prom, he said.  Lying on the huge bed sandwiched between my truly amazing children as we watch Spanish-language melodrama and supply our own dialog. Checking my email only once a day.

I am writing this on a plane headed to Mexico.  Next to me is my sleeping husband.  Behind me my two post-teenage sons are playing an absurdly complicated card game of their own invention and arguing good-naturedly about the ever-changing rules. Behind them is my teenage daughter, my 17 year old, my younger self.  Only she isn’t.  She is both better and worse behaved than I was, more willing to be part of the family yet more her own person.  Moodier than I was – and that’s saying much – but also, occasionally and surprisingly, more compliant.  This girl is both completely recognizable and consistently mysterious.

This trip, for example.  She is enthusiastic.  She has mentioned several things we can do together: pool aerobics, getting our hair braided on the beach and, I probably shouldn’t mention this, drinking sweet, watered down rum drinks at the swim-up bar.  Yes, it’s that kind of Mexican vacation.  Authentico.  Who knows what this week will bring.  I’m going to assume (and gird for) ups and downs.  But I am also going to thoroughly enjoy the fact that she is here, uncomplaining (for the moment), that the next seven days spreads out before us, as a family, and that (for the moment) Lizzie is okay – more than okay — with this.

PS  I just took this photo  with my iphone out the window of the plane…it did a stop-action number on the prop/jet.   Very cool.

Then, new tactic:  Don’t bring up the future at all.  Don’t mention the letters she is getting from schools interested in her as a track athlete.  Don’t bring up the college open house night at her high school.  Make no comment about the postcards she’s getting from culinary schools. Result:  She reaches a new level in Skyrim.

Change in strategy:  When in the car (captive audience), bring up casually and in a general, global, vague-enough-to-not-be- about–her-at-all way that senior year is pretty scary, that everyone is scared, regardless of what they say or how much they seem to be in control.  Insert personal anecdote about my senior year trepidations.  Bring up excitement and challenge of making one’s one decisions.  Insert second personal anecdote.  Remark that no decision is a decision.  Result: Insertion of earbuds.

Bolt out of blue:  Two days ago, apropos of nothing, Lizzie tells me that she intends to go to college this fall, taking a mix of health, psychology and business classes.  I am afraid to say anything at all.  I could so easily jinx this.  I smile (but try not to beam), give her a big hug (but don’t linger too long).  The next day she tells me she’s looked over the course catalog and found some cool classes she’d like to take.  She has also, she says, sent in the information and statistics the college track coach had asked for (months ago).  I smile and nod.  Then I run upstairs, close the bedroom door and do a little dance.

This show appears nightly at our house, in our kitchen, while Lizzie does the dishes – a new and wonderful thing that simply happened.  Her job has always been to clear the table, but, of her own volition, she recently took on the larger task of loading the dishwasher, hand washing pots and pans, wiping the counters.  Color me amazed.  She now shoos us out of the kitchen, closes the door, cranks up Pandora and goes for it.  I sneak a peek at the show when I come in to make my post-dinner tea.  She used to stop dead when she saw me, embarrassed I guess.  But no longer.  I am even, sometimes, invited to join in.

I don’t know what makes me happier, her love of music, the power and fluidity of her movements, her willingness to let me in — or a clean kitchen.  But I am in heaven.  This latest turn of events also makes the realize how much music used to mean to me when I was her age, how central it was to my daily life, especially to my emotional life, how my day began and ended with music, how I tracked new releases, knew the lyrics to almost every song I heard on the radio, stood in line to buy the newest Stones album.  Back when vinyl was king and people still went to stores to buy music and horse-drawn carriages crowded the cobble-stone streets.  Music was (I’m pretty sure this is a cliché) the soundtrack to my life.

Listening to Lizzie’s soundtrack – in the kitchen, in the car, everywhere she is and whatever else she is doing — has brought me back to those days.  And it feels good.  Uh. You know that it should.

Both, I think — and also neither.

There’s a part of Lizzie, probably a part of most teens on the cusp of something they don’t understand the momentous cuspiness of, that is consumed with today: the boy who likes her, the essay she is writing, the new mascara she bought, the Xbox game she’s playing.  She could squint into the future and maybe see something, but she’s not interested in squinting.

Every grown-up she encounters asks about her post-graduation plans.  She’s polite, and vague. “Working, traveling, maybe taking some classes,” is what she usually says.  If pressed, she has no plan.  The only plan is:  Get the hell out of high school.

Boy do I get that.

Although I did know what I wanted to “be” when I grew up (yes, a writer) and although by the end of my first semester senior year I had heard that I was accepted to the school I had my heart set on attending, I also was mostly and intensely motivated by the “get the hell out” directive.

There’s this moment – it comes to kids at different ages – when you realize just how constrained your life is, …  just how little choice you exercise over what is important, just how few choices you get to make.  Before this ah-ha moment, it’s not occurred to you that where you live, the school you attend, the food you eat, the rhythm of your daily life — not to mention the cultural, philosophical, political and economic air you breath — is mostly determined by others.  You were born into an ongoing tale, and you assume your place in the story.

That’s good.  It gives you the chance to be a kid.  It gives you the chance to look around.  And then, in the blink of an eye, it’s bad.  It’s like jail.  And all you can think about (if you’re a compliant, play-by-the-rules kid) is serving your time and getting out.  That’s what the last semester of high school is all about: serving your time.

Tomorrow is the first day of Lizzie’s final semester in high school.