Like kids all across this great nation, mine recently went back to school, and I find myself thinking about all the stuff that nobody ever told me about how their school would matter – to me.

I mean, sure, I knew I would be buying school supplies, and we would pick out a special outfit, and I would make sure they were clean and brushed and all. But what about this ginormous zit on my cheek?

When I was childless, I had no idea I would be worried about me and what I look like at summer’s end. But there I was the other day, age 45, peering into the mirror, considering how best to conceal the drying remains of a huge pimple on the first day of school. Thinking about how to wear my hair. Mentally choosing an outfit. You know — not too fancy, not too sloppy. Cute! Who doesn’t want to look cute the first day back?

And the homework! No one ever told me, not once, that having kids meant you would be doing first grade math again. And again! Once again for every child! That until a certain age, their homework is your homework, and if the six year old forgets her homework? You cannot blame the six year old. Because she’s six.

Oh and mean kids! Means kids, like the poor, you will always have with you. I mean always: That kid who snubbed yours, or said that nasty thing, or those parents who apparently decided apropos of nothing (as far as you can tell) that no, in fact, they don’t want their kid playing with your kid because their kid keeps asking for playdates but they stop actually returning phone calls and you finally have to explain to their kid (who is all of 8 years old) that her parents aren’t calling — those people? They don’t go anywhere after the unpleasant occurrence! The awkward irritation just goes on and on!

It’s not like an adult situation where you can arrange to simply not cross paths with the jerk — the jerk is a second-grader! Who sits in your kid’s class everyday! Or they’re her parents! And every time you see that jerky kid, or unthinking adults, you feel another little twinge in your heart for your child — because, in fact, you would spare your baby any pain on this earth, if only you could, and yet you can’t even guarantee basic decency from the people around him.

And speaking of your heart, no one ever tells you that you will find yourself in an actual, living-breathing emotional relationship with your children’s teachers. That it will hit you like a ton of bricks one day that the teachers spend more hours of the day with your children than you do. That the teacher is, in fact, a co-raiser of your child — particularly if, as is the case in our school, the kids generally have the same teacher for two or even three years in a row. And that furthermore, if those teachers are deeply wonderful, as our kids’ teachers are, you will come to love them, truly.

I choke up a little bit just thinking about Ms. D–, teacher of the girl, and Ms. W–, teacher of the boy, because I know the love and respect they have for my babies, and all the other parents’ babies who pass through their doors, and can’t begin to express what that love and respect and effort and professionalism — in the best, warmest, highest-calling sense of the word — mean to me. It’s a kind of relationship, a kind of love, that nobody ever told me I would have, but it’s bone-deep, and very real.

And I’m grateful for it, because that love, those teachers, that school – all have made my own life a bigger, wider, broader place to be.

And the kids are doing great.

A few weeks ago, I stood before my pretty sizeable CD collection (once this was a source of pride. I suspect that in this MP3 age, it serves as a badge of shame) and randomly grabbed some George Michael to listen to.

A) Don’t you judge me! The man has a gorgeous voice, and has recorded more excellent tunes than you or I will ever have to our names. Plus which, it’s hard to write when listening to Loud And Angry Rock N’ Roll. (And I also have Throwing Muses, Garbage, Silversun Pickups, Cornershop, U2, and a random Swiss band called Pamela Cash sitting here in the pile as well. So.).

B) If I’m not mistaken, it’s the only George Michael (and/or Wham) that we own, so it really is kind of random. It’s not even Faith – it’s Older, the album he recorded in the wake of the death of his (I think) Spanish lover. There is some palpable heartbreak, and real wisdom (with a snappy beat!) here, the sort of beauty that we often miss when we’re busy feeling all above a certain art form. Not that I would ever feel that way. I’m listening to it as I type, and quite honestly, it’s a terrific piece of work.

At any rate, none of that is my point! I was struck, as I looked at the stunning, chisled George Michael peering out at me from the cover art — the word “OLDER” printed in silver just to the lower right of his beautiful mouth — that he was not really all that old when he released this album, in 1996. The internet tells me that he was born in 1963, so: 33? That’s not really all that much older than anything.

Except that of course, he felt older. He’d already been through a thing or two or twelve, and we all start out so young, that everything after, I don’t know, high school? Just feels: Older. Who knew I’d be here someday? (I remember contemplating the year 2000 when I was a kid and realizing that I would be 35 then, and it just seemed so – foreign).

And ever since my afternoon with George Michael, I’ve been thinking about this older, this endless becoming older of ours, and how we often seem to think that we know what we’ll be like when we achieve older — and yet we often don’t. Or at least, I didn’t.

I’m a year younger than Mr. Michael, and in looking for Older‘s release date in the liner notes, I had to adjust my glasses, squinting this way and that. I suspect Michael is in a similar boat right now — the human eye has a roughly 40 year warranty, and after that, biology just takes its toll. I wonder if he looks back on that title he chose, at the ripe old age of 33, and chuckles.

Already, at the ripe old age of 44, there are things that I thought would always matter to me that just don’t anymore. And I think that the surprise is not that that’s the case — after all, in my youth, I could see that some people had let certain things go in their middle years, was horrified by this, and assumed that within themselves, these middle-aged types were a little mortified themselves. The surprise is that I’m rarely mortified by it.

I am still me, and there is much that mattered to me then that matters to me still (the first question, for instance, that I always want to ask new acquaintances, to this day, is: “What music do you like?” I no longer do so, though, because mostly this is not a question that the over-25 crowd asks), but there is much that just doesn’t anymore. The other day I glanced at a young woman wearing something or other that was clearly a fashion statement involving a really wide belt, and I thought to myself that back when we wore those same ugly belts in the 1980s, it was all part of a much larger gestalt, involving geometric shapes, and cantilevered hair, and shoulder pads. “It was a whole THING!” I thought. And then it hit me, like a bolt out of the blue: Maybe it’s a whole THING for her, too! I am just no longer interested in what that THING may happen to be. Not that she shouldn’t care — just that I don’t.

And I suspect that this holds true for bigger issues and weightier questions, down the line.

I worry about aging — I don’t like to admit it, but I do. I worry about how it will feel to be the goofy-looking old woman with discolored skin and hair that won’t lie flat and I can’t get my mascara on right anymore but I keep doing it, because it’s part of how I understand myself and I can’t see well enough to see that it looks awful. I spend time hoping that I will have people around me who love me enough to say “Grandma, enough with the mascara already.” I worry about how it will feel to know that I can’t — I don’t know — walk to the corner anymore, or drive, or read regular-sized type.

These worries focus, I think, on issues of respectability and pride and a sense of self. How will it feel to watch pieces of me, parts of my body and parts of my spirit, fall away from usefulness? How will it feel to move in society as this new old person?

Of course, please God, I should be so lucky. I am now nearly ten years older than my own father will ever be, and it’s the lucky among us who get to earn our liver spots.

But also, in the wake of noting the one-word title of a 16 year old CD, it has struck me that, when the time comes, I will be that old person. I will have been through a thing or two or twelve, and I will not then feel about it as I do now. Some things will be losses, and I will mourn them — and some things will just be. And I can’t know, from this distance, what those things are.

There is no grand conclusion to all of this. At least, not until I shuffle off this mortal coil, hopefully in some grand and glorious — or at least pain-free — fashion.

I hope there’s more joy than pain in growing older, and I hope that I maintain a modicum of dignity, because not all of us get to do that. Other than that, I think I pretty much just have to let it happen. I hope George Michael gets to, too. Dude can really sing.