Postcard from Nowhere

So.
He’s in France.
Armed with a Chromebook.
Armed with time.
Armed with all the tools he needs to make real progress on the three things that could shape his future.

The EPQ.
The college applications.
The apprenticeships.

The things that, in theory, should have him leaping out of bed, fired up, hungry.
The things he says he wants — the Mustang, the nice house, the job, the independence.

It’s been a week.
And... nothing.

No updates.
No messages about progress.
No “hey mum, look what I’ve done.”
Just silence.

And I’m sitting with that heavy, familiar dread — the one that whispers:

If I don’t do it, it won’t happen.
If I don’t chase him, it won’t happen.
If I don’t push, remind, nudge, prompt, sit beside him again… it won’t happen.

And I’m exhausted just thinking about it.

Because I want to believe in him. I do.
I want to believe that he's taking this time and using it.
That he’s figuring things out in quiet ways.
That something is shifting under the surface.

But the silence feels less like focus and more like avoidance.
And I hate that I’m still holding all the mental checklists — from a country away.

What’s strange — and maybe a little hopeful — is that I have noticed a shift.
Not in him, necessarily, but around him.

His brothers are watching.
They see the rejections, the closed doors, the awkward silences when people ask what he’s doing next.
They see the gap between the dream and the effort.
And I think — I hope — that they’re learning something from it.

Maybe they’ll work a little harder to avoid the same position.
Maybe they’ll take their own futures more seriously, not because I told them to, but because they’ve seen what happens when you don’t.
Because they watched me sit behind their brother, correcting his punctuation, expanding on his one-word answers, turning “yes” into “I would love to join Company X because I’m passionate about cybersecurity and intrigued by the risk management challenges in a global context.”

Maybe all that invisible labour wasn’t entirely wasted.
Maybe it just wasn’t aimed at the person I thought it was for.

I want to let go.
I try to let go.
But how do you step back when stepping back might mean watching him drift further from the life he says he wants?

This is the part they don’t warn you about —
Parenting older teens isn’t just curfews and car insurance and exam prep.
It’s watching them idle in the shallows when the tide’s right there, ready to take them somewhere.

And knowing you can’t row the boat and teach them to paddle.
You can’t be the fire and the ambition.

So I wait.
And I wonder.

Maybe this is his quiet before the leap.
Maybe this is just… France.

But right now, it feels like the future’s buffering.
And I’m still the one paying for the WiFi.