A Millimeter Back

Yesterday was my niece’s birthday, and we were all at a restaurant for dinner — a diner serving pizzas and pastas. Everyone was enjoying themselves, including my son, who had found a fellow football lover and was chatting animatedly.

Suddenly, he stopped talking, looked at me and said, “You know this song?”

I had to strain my ears really, really hard to even understand what song was playing. While I was doing that, he started humming along.

To my dismay, I didn’t know the song, so I admitted as much.

Then came another song — a Spanish song, no less. He looked at me, and I could see him lip-syncing along with the Spanish words. That shocked me a little more.

He thoroughly enjoyed the look on my face.

The whole evening then became predominantly about our knowledge of songs — me struggling, and him boasting about his newly developed music encyclopedia. He knew the songs, the albums and the singers. I even heard him discussing a song that had played at the FIFA final in 2014!

That was the year he was born.

So, while I was absorbing all this — a little proud of his keen interest and newly developed knowledge — I was also a bit sad.

For the first time in 12 years, I felt outdated in my child’s life.

Okay — his music life. I know I’m being dramatic.

But though I was so glad that he now had something that could stay with him forever, something that might help him through some tough times, the mother in me also understood something for the first time.

My son was beginning to know things, discover things and explore worlds beyond my own.

And you have to be a mother to understand what a mixed feeling that is.

As I watched him happily hum and sing along to the tunes of BTS, I knew it was time for me to step back — just a millimeter — and watch him become his own person.

P.S. Don’t worry if you don’t know BTS. Just do what I did — Google it.