A note to my daughter upon her graduation
Baby please don't go. But don't stay either.
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Baby please don’t go. But don’t stay either.
The big day is almost here, sweetie. On Sunday, you will graduate from high school. So far I’m keeping it together, but that’s only because I have convinced myself that the graduation ceremony itself really isn’t that big of a deal.
I mean, it is, and it isn’t.
It’s more like a door you’re going to walk through, only you won’t close it behind you until you go away for college. So I’ve got another couple of months to pretend everything is normal, pretend my entire life isn’t going to change more than any time since you were born, pretend you’re still my little girl.
Even though it’s been a very long time since that was true.
But time waits for no man, or for no high school graduate, and your day of departure will be here soon enough, so through gritted teeth and misty eyes I tell you to go get them, go kick butt, go show the world …
WAIT!
NO!
DON’T GO!
IT’S TOO SOON!
COME BACK HERE!
I want you to be a baby again. I will never, ever forget my astonishment when you squeezed my right index finger in the first 10 minutes of your life. I want to go back there, to be endlessly mesmerized by your white-blond hair and your lake-blue eyes and the thousand ways you were obviously destined for greatness, such as putting your foot in your mouth and rolling over and sneezing liquid bananas into my face.
Great merciful God in heaven to be able to hear you giggle for the first time again!
No, 3 was better, like in that photo above, when sometimes I carried you but you were getting too big for that. You could do it on your own, you thought, and sometimes you were right, an idea that echoes loudly today.
Nah, forget that, I want you to be 5 again. Let’s go back to when you spent seemingly entire days changing from your Belle dress to your Laura Ingalls Wilder dress back to your Belle dress and sometimes just saved the time and wore both.
Nope, 7 was better. I want to be at the park. I want you to ask me to push you on the swings. I want to say no. Then I want to push you on the swings anyway and for us to play that nameless game where you keep asking me to push you and I keep saying no even though I’m pushing you all the while.
I could do that forever.
Well, no, wait.
I don’t really wish you were forever 7, because if you were forever 7, you’d never be 9, and we’d never play bad waitress. Wait, was that 9? What age was that? Ah, who cares, let’s play bad waitress! I’ll sit down at a (pretend) restaurant, you take my order, come back a few minutes later with a bunch of food that is not what I ordered, and I’ll throw a (pretend) fit.
Now that I think of it, you work (sniff) at a real restaurant now.
We could play it for real!
I’ll come in, order something, you get it all wrong, I’ll throw a fit right there in the restau—.
What?
Why not?
Of course the problem with being forever 9 is you’d never be a teen-ager … and well maybe that wouldn’t be so bad.
KIDDING!
With love, I’ll say I wouldn’t want to relive everything from that era. Teaching you to drive, specifically to parallel park, was not our finest hour together. Though with that bad came this good: Our aimless drives through the countryside to pile up the hours necessary for you to get your license. And by aimless I mean we were headed toward small-town ice cream shops.
Oh, the irony of spending so much time with you so you could get your license and thereafter I would spend so much less time with you.
When you were really young, 2, 3, 4, you got to the top of a slide, looked down, said, “I don’t think this is a good idea,” and turned around and walked down. This happened several times. Now, as a teen-ager, you are dang near fearless, going rock climbing, visiting a third world country on a mission trip, auditioning for plays, acting in plays, directing plays and speaking in front of the entire student body plus administrators, teachers, parents, etc.
If you grew that much in those 10 to 15 years, where will you be in the next 10 to 15?
The answer will be amazing. And it starts soon, as here we are, mere days from you walking across the stage to get your diploma.
I’m sure you’re excitedly counting down the days before you leave for college. I’d rather not know that number.
I’m sure on that day I’ll be boo-hooing up a storm.
I’m warning you because my mom’s boo-hooing caught me off guard (though it shouldn’t have), and it concerned me for the 30 whole seconds it took me to say goodbye to her and my dad (who didn’t cry at all) and walk back to my room and by then I completely forgot my parents even existed as I jumped neck deep into the first day of the rest of my life.
I hope you’ll care about my crying for a little longer.
I hope it’ll bug you for at least a minute.
And then you can forget all about it.
I never came home except for holidays.
I hope you don’t either. I hope you make friends that make you laugh the way my college friends made me laugh. I hope you create memories as formative as the ones I shared here.
And I hope you have so much fun you never want to come back home.
Not least because I’m turning your room into a mancave.
Just kidding.
Mom needs an office.