Yesterday was the first day of school for the boys. I’ve been looking forward to this day for a month. I was very much ready to have the house and my computer to myself. I was craving a few hours of completely solitary time to write without interruptions for lunch or for assistance in finding a clean pair of socks. I did get a couple of hours of quiet time in the morning, but it was only a half day of school. After noon, I was back to being a full service concierge for the boys.

Last night, Jonah and I worked on a system for organizing his notebooks. Steve did the back-to-school shopping with the boys and let Jonah loose in Staples without any guidance. Jonah purchased large (and expensive) binders for each of his eight classes. His system, or lack thereof, would not fit in his backpack, and he ended up carting around the extra binders in a plastic shopping bag. He had no place for pencils and planned on putting a couple of two-inch pencils in the front pocket of his jeans.

While he was in school, I went back to Staples and found a pencil case with three rings for the binders. I consolidated his system down to two binders – one for the morning classes and one for the afternoon classes. I bought three-ring folders to hold important papers from his teachers. Then I walked him through the system, and together, we made labels for the folders and the dividers.

There’s something about parenting that forces you to do a compare and contrast with your own youth. When I was fourteen, my parents were certainly not helping me organize my binders. Sure, high school was a lot easier back then. A trapper folder did the trick. The high school course catalog didn’t have the options of a small liberal arts college. But, still, I was a lot more independent than Jonah is at fourteen.

I suppose I was a lot more independent than other kids my age, because my parents were figuring out middle class parenting from scratch. Both had come from highly dysfunctional, working-class families, and they had no traditions to fall back upon. They were fabulous parents. I always had clean clothes and a proper meal at dinner time. My dad stayed up all night helping me type up my English essays. But they gave me a lot of freedom that would be totally weird today and was probably a little bit odd even back then.

I dealt with the college application process entirely on my own. There were no tours of college campuses. I took out a book from the library with the rankings of the colleges. I figured out which group of colleges that I could get into based on my grades and SAT scores. I narrowed down the list to about ten. I filled out the forms by myself. I wrote the essay without them even glancing over the paper to look for typos or grammatical errors. Their only involvement in my college plans came when they told me that they could only afford the one public college on my acceptance list.

When I was nineteen, I sat around my childhood bedroom during a summer break with two high school buddies. We hatched a plan of backpacking through Europe the following summer. We, well mostly me, spent the year researching this plan. I figured out how much money that I would need. Using my own money saved up from summer jobs and a job in the dishroom at college, I put aside $2,000 for the entire trip. I went to a travel agent and booked a plane ticket. I bought a Eurorail pass. I sent away for American Hostels membership and book. (All this was prior to the Internet, so everything was snail mail and books at the library.) I bought a backpack. Nobody in my family had been to Europe before, so I relied on books for assistance about the best sights to check out.

Then the following summer, I went to Europe with my two high school friends for six weeks. My parents had no idea where we were for six weeks. No cell phones or e-mail check-ins. No AFS or study abroad bureaucracy to supervise the trip. We had put together a tentative schedule, but we switched things up after one week, when we had a particularly good time in Ireland and wanted to spend more time there. If something terrible had happened, my parents wouldn’t even have known what country we were in.

I turned 20 in Venice. It was a fabulous trip. It was a life-changing trip. Not just because of the Uffizi, the Louvre, the pub in Dublin, and the new friend in Bologna. But because I organized and executed a six-week trip entirely on my own at age 19.