School's out for our clan -- just another stop on life's highway
| Monday, Jun 15 2009 03:26 PM
Last Updated Monday, Jun 15 2009 03:26 PM
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The white graduation gown waited in the wings all week for the big event. I had dutifully tumbled it in the dryer to take out the wrinkles. Ready to float behind her as she walked onto the stage to accept her diploma, it hung in my daughter's bedroom like a ghost, like an invitation to sentimentality, catching my eye every time I walked past her door. The thoughts arrived unbidden: Can she really have grown up so fast? Remember how she posed on the porch with her Pocahontas backpack on her first day of school? How did all that time slip through my careless fingers?
I saved myself from drowning in deep ponderings by heading for the safer, shallower water of philosophy. One of the things I like about life (and there are so many things I like) is that together we humans represent every possible stage of development between birth and death. In any given family or neighborhood or town, there are people who range in age from infancy to old age, who have arrived at various milestones, who play roles from baby to great-grandmother, from student to professor, from renter to homeowner, from dishwasher to billionaire. While some of us are starting families, others of us are downsizing. While some of us suffer the indignities of adolescence, others of us are in our prime. Often our age determines at whose side we travel on the path of life. At other times we share experiences across the generations. There are folks ahead of us and behind us as we journey towards life's fulfillment. And it has always been thus.
Now my husband and I are recent arrivals to a way station of life where we are not yet entirely comfortable. We aren't sure that we want to be here. For many years we've had a house bursting with girls, not all of them technically ours. But our youngest of four daughters has graduated from high school, and we are tentatively measuring the rooms of our soon-to-be empty nest. So far they seem too large, and definitely too quiet.
Our oldest daughter started preschool 22 years ago, and so for two decades our lives have been shaped and scheduled by the demands of school. The fact that my husband was a classroom teacher for many of those years only added to the pervasive influence that the public school calendar exerted on our family. We have lived through four distinct careers in elementary school, middle school, and high school. All have been illuminating; some more joyful, some rougher going. We have now seen safe passage through them all.
Such a bittersweet high school graduation ceremony, then, knowing it was our last. Our capped and gowned daughter marched in with her peers, some of whom we have known since their birth. They looked happy and confident and hopeful and so terribly young. (Persistent thoughts again: Why does the youngest to graduate seem so much younger at graduation time than the oldest did? And does she feel it, too?) The speeches, the songs, the tributes, the honors, and even the forbidden beach balls that materialized over the heads of the graduates and were batted briefly about before being destroyed by the vice principal, were all poignant in their finality. My husband took pictures. I battled tears, beginning at the first note of the high school band's rendition of "Pomp and Circumstance."
As parents of the fourth and last child, my husband and I have been more relaxed, more forgiving. The older girls say that their youngest sister gets away with so much more than they ever would have, and they are probably right. As we get older and possibly wiser, we have a wider perspective on what is a big deal, and what is not. We are also more mindful of the passage of time, and yet it has still flitted beyond our grasp. "To what shall I compare this life of ours?" asks the page-of-the-day on my tear-off daily calendar, quoting the Japanese Zen master Sengai. "Even before I can say it is like a lightning flash or a dewdrop, it is no more."
Don't I know it.
So now high school is history for all of our daughters, and our youngest prepares for her college years, away from home and away from us. I know in my heart that she is going to be all right, and so are we. She is ready, as were her sisters before her, to fledge from the nest. I just can't help but notice the space that will soon grow between us.
The white graduation gown and cap hang forgotten now on the back of the spare room door. They've been worn once, already relics that in 10 years my daughter will wonder why we saved. In 10 years, a lot will have happened. Which is another thing I like about life: you just can't know what's around the bend until you round it.
