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Graduation Day

Graduation Day

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All you really need is a camera and some tissues. At this point the graduate will take care of everything else. Processing in, taking a seat and, when her name is called, shaking hands and receiving her high school diploma. But to get to this point has been a group effort. It always is.

When I graduated from high school I didn’t understand what the fuss was about. Celia is probably feeling the same way. Milestones don’t mean as much when the years they mark are so few that they  get along fine without them.

But parents of graduates know better. They know that rituals take us from one place to another. They know there are few moments when you can say that one thing has clearly ended and another has clearly begun.

High school graduation is such a moment.

So, hats off to the graduates … and (if I may say so) to their parents, too!

Parentitis

Parentitis

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The condition of senioritis is well documented. Symptoms include poor attendance at school, lack of attention to homework and a marked increase in silliness of all types.

What is far less known or understood is parentitis. This condition afflicts the parents of high school seniors, especially parents of high school seniors who are also youngest children. Mothers and fathers in this predicament find themselves policing the home, chasing kids back to school and enjoying gallows humor of all types.

They would like to enjoy themselves like their high school seniors, but alas they cannot. They are too busy making sure that final projects are completed.

But though time seems to stand still, it actually does not. Graduation day will arrive, and they pray their child will be among those marching in to “Pomp and Circumstance.” And when the tassels have been moved and the diplomas awarded, then their fun will really begin.

Words from One World

Words from One World

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After six months of phone conversations only I received my first real email communication from Suzanne this morning.

“I’m writing to you from the bustling metropolis of Kandi,” she began. And it must seem like a bustling metropolis to her, living in a village without electricity and running water. On the other hand, she intended irony. After all, she’s a child of the suburbs, grew up in the shadow of our nation’s capital, can maneuver a van around the Beltway at rush hour if need be.

Now, she travels on foot, bike, moto or bush taxi.

Seeing her message makes me want to drop everything, hop a jet to Cotonou and bush-taxi myself right up north to Kandi.

I won’t, of course. Not yet, anyway. This is her world now. I write about it only to remark on how the written word brings her new life to us in such a special, immediate way. Words winging their way from one world to another with the stroke of a key.

Eighteen!

Eighteen!

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Today is Celia’s 18th birthday. Today she reaches
the age of majority … as we creak along toward the age of seniority.
Not really, though. A youngest daughter is a marvelous gift,
keeping her parents in fighting trim, bringing them face to face with the
future (whether they want to see it or not).
I went out before daybreak this morning to pick Celia a
rose. I had no trouble finding one; the whole yard was lit up by a full moon
ringed in a pinkish halo of mist. Above the moon was a contrail, a single arched eyebrow — a shooting star pointing up
instead of down.
It’s a lovely day for a birthday.

Celia at two-and-a-half.
Pushing Send

Pushing Send

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No longer the search for the envelope, the stamps, to say nothing of the white-out and carbon paper that preceded them. No longer the rush to the post office to make the last pick-up of the evening.

Now, instead, it’s the multiple save, the last-minute printer malfunction, the inexplicable garbling of text or omission of “o’s” in the preview document.

Now, at the last possible minute of the second-to-last possible day, it’s wondering whether the document should have been saved as a PDF after all.

But finally, after the problems are solved, the tempers calmed, the signatures checked and the credit card number encoded, it’s time to push “Send.”

Miracle of miracles, the Common App is on its way.

College Tour

College Tour

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It’s been four years since we did this the last time.

Four years since we sat in a darkened auditorium and listened to an admissions director discuss interdisciplinary learning.

Four years since we were last told how to submit a FAFSA.

Four years (or almost that; we did one brief tour this spring and another this summer) since we sauntered through a college campus following a student ambassador who has mastered the art of  walking backward.

Four years, which seems like no time at all — except that a wispy 13-year-old has become a willowy 17-year-old. And we are embarking on our last few college tours.

Now we’re the ones who understand the difference between early decision and early action. We’re the application veterans, with the battle scars to prove it.

But there’s one thing we haven’t mastered yet — and that is saying goodbye. 

Valedictory Frame of Mind

Valedictory Frame of Mind

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I hadn’t meant to wind up at the girls’ elementary school, but that’s where our walk took us. Copper and I had crossed Fox Mill Road, taken a dirt path down to the creek, tiptoed over the spillway (thanks to the low water), trotted down what seems to be an old road along the stream and then trudged up a steep path along a ridge line and (pant, pant — that would be both Copper and me) arrived at the school grounds.

Even though we live less than two miles from the place, it’s tucked away on county parkland and I hadn’t been there in months, maybe years. Only a few days earlier I had gone to my last back-to-school night ever, what was probably my 36th, give or take a few (three children times 12 years), so seeing the old school so soon after that event put me in a valedictory frame of mind.

I kept seeing ghosts of the girls’ former selves, the field days and plant sales in the big field to the east of the school; the playground on that side, too, where we used to come on still summer afternoons (before most of the equipment was deemed unsafe and replaced with boring, innocuous stuff), the mornings when we’d walk to school or I’d drop the girls off at the kiss-and-ride lane.

How big the place once seemed, how imposing. It was a first foray into the real world for them, and such a gentle, loving entry into that world. Almost a decade of dealing with the high school (with its thousands of students and a sign-in process that seems modeled on that of a maximum-security prison) have made me forget what school was like when it was close and comfortable and small-scale.

I miss those years. But I wouldn’t want to live them again.

A much older, smaller (one-room) schoolhouse in our neighborhood.

To Be In Benin

To Be In Benin

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Today Suzanne visits the town of Toura, Benin, West Africa, for the first time. It’s in the far north of the country, in the Alibori region near Banikoara and close to an elephant migration route. She’ll be teaching English to middle-school students there for the next two years. It’s the first time a Peace Corps volunteer has served at this school.

The purpose of the visit is to meet people, visit her hut and see what she’ll need to order or buy to make herself at home in Africa.  Then she’ll return to Porto Novo for more language study and training before she starts teaching in September.

One of the big questions on Suzanne’s mind is how far the well pump is from her hut. She’ll have no electricity or running water so this is not an insignificant question. Already I’ve been turning on the tap less often, reusing sudsy water, thinking more about what goes down the drain. There’s no way to ship it to her, of course. It’s purely sympathetic. A futile attempt to be in Benin with her.

When I do a Google image search on Toura, what comes up most are pictures of wells (water portals) like this one. Image: watsanportal.org.

Twenty-one!

Twenty-one!

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Claire arrived two weeks later than we thought she would, waiting for a break in the heat wave (back when heat waves meant temperatures in the 90s instead of the 100s) to make her debut.

She was a cuddly baby, a tempestuous toddler and, well, we’ll just say a lively teenager.  Now she’s a lovely, caring, accomplished young woman heading into her senior year of college. And today she turns 21.

Back when I wrote parenting articles and the children were younger, I would routinely mine their antics for anecdotes. I don’t do that anymore, of course. But on some days I can’t help but note how proud I am of them, how they continue to amaze me, how very grateful I am to be their mother.

Today is one of those days.

Long Afternoon

Long Afternoon

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Midday walk, less hot than the day before.  White clouds emerge in the sky, meaning there is less haze. I take a familiar route in the opposite direction, which is strangely disorienting. The pond is on my left, the woods on my right. I have to remind myself where I am.

I have to remind myself, also, who I am. I pass kids on their way to the pool. A pair of boys, eleven or twelve, pad by in flip flops with towels around their necks. All I hear of their conversation are the words “post traumatic stress.” A strange utterance; they look like they should be talking about the cannonballs they’ll do at the pool.

Still, they remind me of the great long afternoons of childhood,  the slow-moving stillness of the hour after lunch. I remember the smell of that hour, the hot sun on the swing, the grape candy stick, plans for later in the day, a trip to the park, wading in its cool creek.

I feel like a kid again for a few minutes, though it’s only because I was walking on my lunch hour, pretending for a few minutes that I have no responsibilities, only miles to walk and books to read.