The notebooks are full of a fierce attention to things I do not know. But now I know what they are for. These are records of ordered transcendence. A watcher’s diary. My father’s talk of patience had held within it all the magic that is waiting and looking up at the moving sky.
– Helen MacDonald, H is for Hawk
my sixth grade graduation, May 1986. Sorry for the shadow and poor photo; the picture was so thoroughly glued to the page that I couldn’t take it off to scan it, and I wanted to include my father’s handwriting, because the carefully composed and annotated photo albums that he made are among my most-cherished things.
Tomorrow, Grace graduates from sixth grade.
I remember the day that I graduated from sixth grade, in the same school, in the same building, better than I recall yesterday.
I’ll sit in the gym that I’ve picked her up from for many years, and once again, my own memories will collide with reality and I’ll fall down the telescope into that disorienting place where I am not sure what’s now and what’s then, what’s me and what’s her. But even in this vertigo-like swirl of memory and emotion and time, something essential endures, the sturdy presence of my love for my daughter, a cord whose strength I’m trusting more and more.
I almost worry about saying that out loud, because I fear jinxing myself. I’ve written at length (ad nauseum, even) about my fear of the distance that I know must mark these adolescent and teen years, and about what will happen to my relationship with Grace as we make our way through this time. I know the red string that ties our hearts needs to stretch, and it will, but more and more, I’m also trusting that it will come back eventually.
We are again in the season of endings and beginnings. Of commencement. I feel like a broken record, but I find myself aghast, awestruck, frankly shocked by the velocity of time. Life’s whistling past my ears ever faster, just as I was told it would. Even as I join in the celebrations, which are bigger this year than ever, because graduation from 6th grade is a big passage at our school, I’m sorrowful in equal measure, and Stanley Kunitz’s feast of losses echoes in my head.
Last night was the sixth grade graduation party, and I was proud to watch Grace dance all night long, singing enthusiastically to everything from Journey to Katy Perry. The moment I won’t forget was when all the parents were dancing with our sixth graders, belting out the words to I’ve Had the Time of My Life. Once again, then and now collided, and I found myself blinking away tears. Time is confoundingly elastic, and the past – in the song, in the memories, in the dizzying blending of then and now – felt animate, tangible, in the present.
At our sixth grade graduation, in 1986, we sang Whitney Houston’s The Greatest Love of All, and that night I co-hosted a graduation party with some friends at a local tennis club (I went on to celebrate my engagement to Matt, my 30th birthday, my mother’s 60th birthday, and a host of other meaningful occasions in the same space). It was a sunny and beautiful day and my conviction that the future spread in front of me, glittering, assured, was tempered substantially by my parents’ recent announcement that we were moving to London after Christmas. I recall sitting on the sidewalk outside of the tennis club crying about the departure, though I can’t recall if that was before or after the party. I also remember that one of our longtime babysitters DJed and that the last dance was Phil Collins’ Separate Lives, played twice.
The full photograph above, which I cropped, includes the faces of three of my closest friends from lower school. I’m grateful to still be in touch with all three of them. I look around at Grace’s friends and wonder who she’ll still count dear in 29 years.
While it feels like only weeks ago that I stood there, it was almost 30 years ago. Wow. Tomorrow I’ll go through the looking glass again, into the place where time and memory and love and loss swirl together into a heady mixture whose power can bring me to my knees.
Only one thing I can do. Blink back my tears, look at my only daughter, my first child, and be here now.
Grace at my 15th year business school reunion on Saturday, sitting in my 1st year classroom, in my 1st semester seat. She’s closer to the age I was when I sat there than I am now.
I’ve long been a huge fan of Kyran Pittman‘s writing. I loved her book, Planting Dandelions: Field Notes From a Semi-Domesticated Life
“I’m supportive of anything that keeps her focused and moving forward. All I can do is try to clear away as much bullshit as possible so that she can access her future. The older she gets, the less I can control, and the less I can protect her from. It’s a bit nerve-wracking. I did get her a Swiss Army Knife last week. Because you never know when you’ll need one of those.”
Kyran’s introduction was:
This is as great a teen parenting philosophy as I’ve ever heard. Getting them to adulthood with as many choices intact as possible, and the wherewithal to choose well–that’s what it’s about now for us.
And then she added:
Or as Asha Dornfest so aptly put it, we’re parenting with the end game in mind now. When they’re little the whole object is to keep them safe. And then one day it hits you, that was just a temporary assignment.
I haven’t been able to stop thinking about these lines. Parenting with the end game in mind now. Yes. And the object is still to keep them safe, but the definition of safe has changed entirely. It doesn’t feel accidental that I have this stop-and-go vertigo right now, that I feel a little unsteady on my feet, that the world feels like it’s whirling around me in a way a little more unnerving than usual.
Everything is changing, and the truth is it’s hard to catch my breath or find my footing.
Grace is sprinting towards 13, and her entire body and self are leaning towards the future in a way that I find both deeply reassuring and frankly terrifying. She’s a young woman, and suddenly parenting feels different. Of course I’ll be her mother until the end of time, even when we’re both gone, but the definition of motherhood has changed, and it feels a bit like an ill-fitting garment. Certain things that I had just gotten used to are gone and others which I somehow thought I had more time to prepare for have arrived.
I’ve always, from my very first days of motherhood, believed that my children do not belong to me. I’ve written that very sentence point-blank (as an aside, in searching for that link, I discovered that I wrote my daughter, who’s about to graduate from sixth grade, a letter on this blog on her first day of kindergarten – wow). Grace and Whit are passing through me on their way to the great wide open. They are not mine; it is my distinct honor and privilege to share these years with them. But still, the realization that I’m in the second half – probably the final third – of this season jars me. The losses pile one on top of each other. I’ve said before that while motherhood has contained more surprises than I can count the central one is probably how bittersweet it is. I ferociously love my children, and the emotion I feel for them is the central guiding tenet of my life. But even almost 13 years into being a mother, I’m staggered, over and over again by the losses that this ordinary life contains and by how frequently my eyes fill with tears.
My role these days with my tween is about abiding, knowing when to bite my tongue, being patient, and trusting that our bond will survive this passage. It is making sure she has a soft place to land when she needs it but also gently encouraging her to step outside of that familiar circle to challenge herself. It’s in that space beyond what is known that growth happens, even though it’s scary. For us both.
It’s keeping the end game that Kyran and Asha mentioned in mind. It’s knowing that what I want is an independent, brave, autonomous child. After all, so many years ago, when I put 5 year old Grace on a plane alone, I said confidently that only a child secure in her attachments can venture away. I still believe that. I just didn’t realize how much it would hurt.