The last weeks of the last school year, ever/forever

How it started, how it's going, what's next

How it started: The first day of kindergarten for my first born, 2009.

In a few weeks my youngest kid graduates from high school. And just a few weeks after that she turns 18 and my son turns 20. And just like that, I will be both the mother of adult children and done with the public school K-12 system. Forever.

“Forever” is so dramatic, isn’t it? We think some things are forever (marriage) yet few things truly are (death). “Empty nest” isn’t much better. It has about the same effect on me as “ovarian failure”. The bad, sad language of seeing everything through the lens of loss instead of the inevitable arrival of the next life stage is something I’ve fought hard against. Yet now with these transitions squarely on my doorstep, I feel less like the mother who’s threaten-joked about getting birthday and graduation cakes this year that say GET OUT and more like someone hit right-between-the-eyes with big changes that were a lifetime in the making. None of this was a surprise and yet, how surprising it all feels.

I started my journey as a parent in the public school system with an early evening informational session at the new arts magnet elementary school. I showed up same-day hungover from getting laid off from my job that very morning and coping with it about as well as that all sounds. It was the job that brought us from Oregon to Vermont. It was the job that established me as the clear breadwinner in our family. It was the job that was supposed to make everything possible.

If you had told me at that information session — where I was on the verge of tears the entire time thinking about how I had failed my family by losing my job — that I would go on to freelance, make more money than I ever had full-time, and I would do that until my kids graduated from high school, all without us having to leave Vermont, I wouldn’t have believed you. If you had also told me that by the time this moment arrived, on the verge of the last graduation, that their dad and I would be divorced and I’d be living in a condo, just like my dad did when my parents first separated, I would’ve told you to fuck off.

Just 2-1/2 months after getting laid off, when I realized everything was probably going to be ok.

Allow me to quote Kierkegaard who I have absolutely never read otherwise, “Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.” Preach, Søren.

It is a strange and unreliable thing to try to understand forever when forever is central to the discussion, whether it’s thinking forward (getting engaged, planning for the future) or backward (graduating, completing a journey). When my kids were little I would well up with tears at the mere idea of them graduating one day and moving away from me. It didn’t matter that it was a decade away, it was offensive. Of course that’s why kids don’t graduate when they’re ten. It takes time to mature and become independent and I’m not sure whether I’m talking about kids or parents or both.

What I didn’t see coming, aside from everything, is that I would start writing for myself (and not just for work) when they were 8 and 10. I wrote about having babies and having miscarriages, the PTSD of pumping at work and not getting off of a work call even though my son was bleeding from his face. I railed at and embraced motherhood in equal measure. I poked at the squishy heart and frequent absurdity of modern parenting culture, like this piece that’s been making the rounds lately, as it does every year around this time, which is great fun for me eight years later.

Writing changed how I thought about myself and how I understood my life. My life became less about holding onto my kids for as long and as tightly as possible and, instead, creating a parallel world alongside them that was only mine. This gradually created porous borders between us, us nascent independent nations, rather than me encircling them and waiting for the center to drop out and leave me hollow.