A Year of Lasts

To exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly. –Henri Bergson
This week brings the graduation of my seventh and eighth children, twin boys. As I gather the pictures for their Senior posters to display on graduation night, the past 18 years converge and distill on one 28”x22” piece of flimsy white cardboard. Even though I have walked this walk six times before I still ask myself, “How did this happen? How did these little boys who I used to pull onto my lap together to read a story turn into young men who now tower over me. Where did the last 18 years go?” I know that I am not the first parent to entertain such thoughts, I think every parent who has watched their child leave the nest has had similar thoughts. “Sunrise, Sunset, One season following another, Laden with happiness and tears” as Tevye from Fiddler On the Roof so aptly sang.
Last August I took the last “First Day of School” picture. After putting miles and miles on our car chasing cross-country runners all over the state this year we attended the last cross-country race, served the last prom dinner, and held the last parent-teacher conference.
Tonight as I sit with the other parents they seem like family because we have car pooled to so many of the sporting events and shared so much bleacher time together. I watch their sons and daughters march into the gym to the strains of “Pomp and Circumstance” and feel a tug at my heart strings as I realize that they are moving on too. The days of zip-your-coat-here’s-your sandwich mothering have passed and the nights of the basement overflowing with kids, popcorn, movies and Mafia in the dark have quieted. I will still see the parents, on occasion, and their kids on rarer occasions. There is a sweet sadness as I quietly grieve the end of our close association.
So as the graduates stand to change their tassels from one side of their cap to the other and look forward to new time of life, I too look forward to a new time of life. A time that I have watched my friends arrive at, some years ago, that time of the “empty nest”. After 29 years of sending kids out the door to catch the bus I look to open a new chapter in my life. It is both exhilarating and unsettling for both the graduates and me.
The wave of nostalgia passes and I collect myself. My mothering of the past 18 years has been to prepare these boys to leave home, do their own wash, be independent, go to college and serve missions. So why the tears as that is exactly what they are doing? I should be happy, right? I am! I am! But could I just go back to the days when they would hold my hand as we walked and I could nuzzle into the downy softness of their just washed Johnson’s Baby Magic hair? Could I just savor a few more ordinary days? I guess that is what pictures are for.