My teenage son changed completely after a difficult year at school — his former classmates didn’t even recognize him, so he finally did what he’d been planning for months.
My son, had always been the kind of kid who filled a room without trying.He laughed loudly, talked through dinner, and could turn a five-minute story about something that happened in science class into a twenty-minute performance. So when he came home one afternoon talking nonstop about a girl named Tessa, I knew almost immediately what was happening.My fourteen-year-old son had his first real crush.“She laughed at my joke today,” he told me while digging through the refrigerator.
That was all it took.
For the next several weeks, Tessa seemed to appear in every conversation. She liked drawing. She hated tomatoes. She wanted to visit Italy someday. She wore the same silver bracelet almost every day.
Caleb remembered all of it.
One Saturday evening, I found him sitting at the kitchen table with several shopping pages open on his laptop.