I can't wait until he gets his tongue pierced or has his chest tattooed with the Quake logo over his heart, but that's just me. This one, the eldest of my spawn, slithered home from the dorm early Friday morning to drop off his dirty laundry and collect some birthday adulation.

While we were catching up on his impressions of his first week of dorm life and college classes, he casually dropped a little bomb on us by mentioning that he had joined the university's skydiving club. His mother took it with aplomb and a sip, wedging a grimace into her coffee cup, because that's what you do when you've raised a kid to be independent.

I suspect that he is too much of a narcissist to tattoo or pierce himself. All the athletic training and competition he underwent throughout his adolescence turned him into a my-body-is-a-temple kind of guy, but the subject of tattoos did come up.

He has embarked on a new stage in his life, a stage that I remember can bring many changes. Change usually entails risk, but not necessarily risk of the sort that demands that you step out of a perfectly good Cessna.

I don't object to tattoos or piercings on my friends, my colleagues, my students, or on other people's children. But eighteen years ago, when all there was of him stretched only from my hand to the crook in my arm, I spent many hours watching him while he slept, his tiny, diaper-clad butt in the air. And while I waited for him to wake from his late afternoon nap, I would marvel at him, as I did at all my sons. In sunlight, his skin was golden and glowing; in shadow, strawberries and cream; in darkness, ivory. As he slept his infant's sleep, I could believe only that he had been created from china or porcelain, not from flesh so imperfect as mine. So, I have an interest.

And I don't.

This moment, however, is not about tattoos at all, but it is about weaning the parents from their role as caretaker, as guardian. And it's not about the thrill of risking your life a mile above earth. At this moment, this is about not just relaxing but loosing the bonds of our imagined ownership of this being. That those bonds of ownership ever existed anywhere but in the parent's mind is unimportant, but he wasn't merely raised to be independent: Somewhere within himself, he has always been his own person. Always.

So.

Happy Birthday, Little Bit.

Good bye, Little Bit.