For a couple of months now, I have been wanting to write about these huge changes that are taking place in my life. Either because of a lack of words, no motivation, feeling completely overwhelmed and emotional, or all of the above, it has not happened. Lauren's senior year went by without scarcely a word being penned. It felt to me if I would have tried that they would have seemed morbid, familiar, boring, and redundant after a while. So, I opted for none at all.
Exactly a week after my youngest one graduated from high school, I find myself still extremely weary and even a little numb from it all. How are you supposed to feel when your child-rearing days are completely over? When you drive on campus the day after her last day at school and you realize you are looking for her car - wondering if she was late for her class? Then you realize....no, you will never need to wonder that again. You will never see her car parked in that familiar spot again. You will never pay another sports fee, you will never go to another soccer game anticipating the "game of her life" (and in your eyes, every one of them - are). You will never have to hear about the drama of high school friendships and "first loves" gone bad. You will never send a check to the cafeteria to pay her lunch bill or send a teacher a note again explaining about a sickness that has kept her away from school. You will never wash school uniforms or move a scattered backpack containing the mysteries of Human Anatomy or Romeo and Juliet.
Those days are gone forever. Never can you regain them. Never can you recall them to do them over, to try a little harder or spend a little more time talking in the car as you take your junior higher to school. It's done - and how you did it and with what attitude you did it - is gone with the turning of the tassle. The tassle turned from the right to the left seems a simple act, but with it comes the shifting of responsibility, accountability, and accessibility.
When I watched her hand touch the tassle and innocently (and excitedly) turn it to the left, I felt my own shifting of a sorts. A shifting away from motherhood as I had known it. The proactive, passionate mother who hardly ever missed a ballgame and attended every single performance of the school play. A mother who brought to school the lunch she had left in the frig or the guitar she needed for practice. The mother who went home to retrieve the camera for the capturing of precious memories and ran to the store to pick up the class party snacks. The maddening mother who called and emailed teachers and coaches when she did not feel her child had gotten her "just deserves". I was that kind of mother and I have absolutely no regrets.
I have a friend who has only one child and I thought of her often as she experienced complete menagerie of emotions her daughter's senior year. It was both her first and last of everything having to do with high school - all in one short, emotional year. I, at least, had already experienced the first child doing this exact thing six years ago. This oldest daughter is now married and only a few months away from experiencing motherhood for the first time. So, I know and have pleasantly experienced that there is definitely life after the high school years. Good years - different, true - but good all the same.
The innocence of childhood long gone, the graduated, young women in my life are discovering so much about themselves, about their father and me, and about life. And I'm liking that I am there to enjoy it.
So, first phase finished. Memories galores - absolutely no regrets! Onward to the second phase! I have a feeling it will be the absolute best...just as the first was!
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