We’ve flown in from Atlanta for a weekend in New York City for my 14-year-old son Addison’s first arena concert. Earlier in the day, on the way to our hotel in Hell’s Kitchen, the newly gentrified neighborhood where I met my husband, I wheel my Samsonite past a Port Authority far different from the predator-thick purgatory I remember from my days living in the city.
On our last night in town, we take in a production of “Spring Awakening,” where my son endures the excruciating reality of watching a musical about sexual coming-of-age, crammed shoulder to shoulder beside his mother.
The trip is a rite of passage, one more in a long line of them since that surreal moment a nurse laid Addison’s wailing 8-pound body on my chest. Like the first time he said “Mama.” Or the day I dropped him off at kindergarten and choked up at the sight of him, tiny and tow-headed in a miniature navy Polo shirt and pleated khaki shorts, looking like an investment banker on a golf vacation. His first full day away from me. The first of many.
