It all comes down to this. In seventeen days, my oldest child will graduate from high school. He’ll gather with his classmates and the teachers who have known him and taught him and nurtured him for the past four years. He’ll wear a cardinal robe and mortarboard and he’ll take his last steps as a high school student. Walking across the stage, he’ll shake hands and smile, feeling proud and accomplished and maybe a little bit sentimental. It’s a moment that’s been a long time coming.
In the audience we’ll sit, along with all the other proud mothers and fathers and grandmas and grandpas, and chances are, I’ll be crying. It’s a big moment, this one that’s coming in just 17 short days, the culmination of a journey that began 18 years ago when early in the morning on a day in mid December, a tiny little boy changed our lives forever.
I didn’t know how life would change. I couldn’t imagine how he would grow, from a squishy blob of sweetness into a strapping young man with a personality all his own. I couldn’t anticipate that he would learn to play the drums or hit a fastball, that bacon and barbeque sauce would be his kryptonite or that he would write mother’s day cards or poetry that would make me cry. No, in that moment I was blissfully unaware.
I didn’t realize that in that moment that I became a mother, I had also become a teacher. At least not fully. I knew about the basics. The endless games of pat-i-cake or hours spent reading The Cat in the Hat. There were countless afternoons spent running alongside him as he learned to ride a bike without training wheels and more hours than I care to admit spent forming small adobe bricks for the fourth grade mission project. He was a good student. He learned what we (and his countless teachers and coaches) taught him, and even a few things we didn’t intend to.
And I loved every minute. Well, not every minute maybe, but most of them. Truthfully, I could have done without the time that he sat down so hard on the dog that she was forced to bite him on the ear and we sat, blood everywhere, in the emergency room waiting for someone to notice. And there was the time that he hid under the clothing racks at Target and we shut down the whole store until we found the little bugger. No, I wasn’t too crazy about those times. But other than that, I’ve loved them all. And in those moments of teaching, in those moments of motherhood, I never allowed myself to look at the end.
Until now.
While it was going on I was blissfully pretending it would last forever. “I had plenty of time,” I told myself. Plenty of time to teach him all the things he needed to know. How to tie a tie or iron a shirt. How to do his own laundry or scramble an egg. There was plenty of time to share lessons about life and friendship, to teach him about hard work and the value of sacrifice. No need to hurry. There was plenty of time.
Until all of a sudden there wasn’t.
We are in the eleventh hour.
A year after I got married, I sat with my friend Lynn in her living room. Her wedding day was approaching and she asked me what I could tell her about married life. What advice did I have for her from my vast experience of one whole year. I paused for a moment, taken aback by the question. What indeed, had I learned?
“It’s hard,” I remember telling her. Not in a bad sort of way, but in the being in a day in and day out relationship is hard work kind of way. I wasn’t meaning to discourage her. To make her afraid or anxious or worried about what was to come. I just wanted to tell her the “truth”. My truth. To share my experience for her to do with what she would.
So, here’s what I’m asking. In this eleventh hour. In these final few days before my firstborn graduates from high school, I’m asking for your help. What would you say to him? What advice would you give him as he gets ready to spread his wings and head off onto this next stage of his life? What lessons have you learned along the way? What wisdom can you share? Think back to the day you graduated from high school. What do you wish someone had said to you about college life or growing up or moving on? Email your thoughts to me here.
My plan is to collect these “truths” and give it to him on the day that he graduates, for him to take with him as he heads east, for him to do with what he will. It is my hope that they will encourage and inspire him.
What “truths” would you share?
My thanks to Patti for this brilliant idea...
