L&T,

This is the summer you are twelve. Please understand, going into this letter, that I have been weepy about how time is passing since your first day of middle school in August, when I dropped you off in front of a school with almost 800 students and watched your still small-ish bodies, lugging backpacks that weighed as much as you do, disappear tentatively into the crowd.

I dropped you off, left the parking lot, and cried in a way that I hadn’t since your first day of kindergarten. Do you remember that day, six years ago? We still lived in Kansas. Our whole family (including your baby sister) had to go to the office on the first day of school for tardy slips. You learned at a young age that we weren’t the kind of family who gets “perfect attendance” awards. After we finally got you to your classrooms, your dad and I took the baby to our favorite cafe in Lawrence, Wheatfields, and cried over lattes and apricot scones.

We’re in California now. It’s June, your last week of 6th grade, and I’m still weepy. It comes and goes, triggered by random things: the song “Forever Young” popping up on the radio, the sound of your boy-voices outside, talkin’ trash in between basketball bounces on the driveway, the way you still want your dad or me to lay down with you at bedtime. The way we often don’t, because it’s late and you’re stalling and we are exhausted. Does it seem like we are always tired?

Anyway, the best friends you’ve made since moving to California are moving back to Michigan. They are also a family with twin boys from the Midwest. You met them in first grade. Even though we and they have moved to different schools since meeting, you’ve kept an important connection and are closer to them than almost any friend you’ve made since. Their parents are like us, both in awe of and disillusioned by this part of the country, a place I heard someone describe recently as being more like a cruise ship than a city: people are always coming and going.

Of course, you and your friends don’t understand how complicated it can be to settle down with strong roots somewhere. I know this because I was twelve once and had to move away from my friends and it felt like the grown-ups were being so selfish. So focused on their lives and oblivious to mine. Now, I understand: it’s complicated. It’s a delicate balance that is impossible to get right. It’s something a person can’t understand until they are entirely responsible for someone else’s life.

We’ve known your friends are moving, but preparing for this bike trip has sort of taken over our lives. The thing is, your dad and I seem to struggle with the kind of life we want to give you. We’ve tried very hard to find our place and make some decisions about the way we want to live. We’ve tried very hard to give you the kind of stability we think is important: a house, a community, dependable income so that you shouldn’t want for basic necessities. (We just don’t think iPhones for 12-year-olds are basic necessities.)

But even though we want this life for our kids, it doesn’t seem to be the life we want for ourselves. We try really hard, I swear we do, but we both have a strong desire for exploration, novelty, and adventure. That’s where this bike trip comes in. This year will be sort of a compromise, to live one way during the school season–with routine, structure, stability–and one way during the summer, a way that feels more natural to us.

Understand that we love having children, we love being a family. But there are different ways family life can work–after I became a mother, I learned that this is the difference between experience and institution–and we struggle with living the way typical American family life works. We want to see what other ways look like.

What does all this have to do with your friends moving?

Over the weekend, we celebrated one last night with our friends and one of the twins decided, at the last minute, to spend the night. This was supposed to be our last weekend for packing, cleaning, and planning for the bike trip, but we tossed the schedule out the window, as we are known to do, and spent time with people we love. The morning after the sleepover, I made you all chocolate chip pancakes, banana muffins, and bacon that I burnt so badly we had to open the doors and windows. I gave you all a mini-lecture about making the conscious decision to have screen-time on your last morning together.

After breakfast, I drove you all down the mountain to return your friend to his parents. About halfway down, it hit me.

It’s June and you’re twelve and your best friends are moving. Suddenly, everything about that moment, that day, became illuminated in a way that I know will be sharply burned into my memory as long as I live. The way the summer sun flooded the car, the warm air, the way you boys went back-and-forth between talking about the video game you spent most of the morning playing and sitting in silence, staring out the window. What were each of you thinking? About the video game? About swimming pools and BBQ’s? About the next time you might see one another?

A Justin Bieber song was on the radio. The car smelled funny and we thought it was dog poop on someone’s shoe and then discovered a carton of milk that I bought a week ago and never brought in. It was one of the rare times no one fought over who had to sit on the middle hump in the back.

I cried the rest of the way down the mountain, but put on my sunglasses so you wouldn’t know. We met your friend’s mother in the parking lot of a grocery store and I cried in her arms. She and I met as parents of 1st graders, with so many years ahead of us to figure things out before our little kids became big kids who would become middle schoolers. It feels like a chapter is closing and we still haven’t figured much out.

I want you to know that we are doing this trip as a way for your dad and I to keep searching for what is important to us while being able to give what we hope is important to you. I think the single most influential book I’ve read thus far is “Walden” by Henry David Thoreau. I read it my freshman year of college. Of his time in the woods by Walden Pond he wrote,

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.

We are going on this trip as a family for a lot of reasons, but the big one, for the grown-ups, is to face the essential facts of our lives. We are leaving our home, jobs, friends, chores, schedules, practices, appointments, commitments, our country, to see what else is out there. The only thing we need with us is you guys and your sister. We just need one another.

But this is us grown-ups. I want you to know, I see you, too. I was twelve once. Back then, I don’t remember wanting to “live deliberately,” because I just was.

Will you remember yesterday like I do? The sun, the song, the smelly car? It’s the summer you are twelve. You’re riding your bikes through another continent because your parents don’t want to “lead lives of quiet desperation,” as Thoreau put it. Your best friends are moving. You’re still some of the smaller kids in your class, but you’re hovering in the twilight between childhood and adolescence, and I never know if you will be laughing or arguing or asking (again) for an iPhone or playing pretend with your little sister. Your moods are always changing.

This is the summer you are twelve.