Commencement 2010: Launch for Grads, Loss for Mom

I got teary-eyed in the Dollar Store today, crouched at the 2/$1.00 Graduation Cards rack.  We have two children graduating, one from college and our "baby" from high school, and when I see the mortarboards and diplomas, the globes signifying the world is theirs, I just lose it.

Our eldest daughter has already marched to to the podium twice, and now attends graduate school in New York City.  That means my husband and I now earn a peculiar status: "empty-nesters."

"Empty" acknowledges a change that is, no matter how you slice it, sad, especially for the mom.  The brain-diagram of even busy, working mothers shows a large chunk devoted to personal activities, but a larger chunk to the schlepping, scheduling, keeping track-of, laundering, picking up-after, sports, lessons, caretakers and performance of her children.  Then there's the emotional chunk that enlarges it.

So, when the last child is gone, it's not just an adjustment--though that, too--it's a loss.  Grocery shopping becomes a different experience when you include picky children--along in the cart, and later, with their food eccentricities and desires in mind.  My son eats three pounds (!) of pasta per week, with one particular type of sauce, and mozzarella cheese, for nearly every meal.  He likes three types of cereal, drinks a gallon of milk over a few days, likes only strawberry jam on his Eggo waffles-and-peanut butter, wants one of three types of soup served for our Sabbath dinners...  All this synapse action in my mind will cease.

It's replaced with worry. Several years ago I wrote a book about happy American families. I won't forget what a Mexican-American father of four young adults said in wistful reflection: "There's no feeling of peace like knowing your kids are all sleeping safely in your home in their own beds."

Consoling friends try to soothe me.  "They'll come back!"  Nice try.  Once they leave home, they're gone.

Sometimes they're physically here, but only as fleeting guests and visitors. Unless there's a financial crisis or something goes wrong, they'll never again consider their parents' their "permanent address."  When my middle child moved into her sorority, she denuded her room of her posters, souvenirs and bulletin board photos, leaving an anonymous shell she uses for Sabbath touch-downs when I "get to" do her laundry.  Our first daughter keeps her room as a museum to her high school self.  Occasionally, she'll fly home, live out of her suitcase, and leave only her unnmade bed as evidence. Her unneeded books, pix of smiling groups of friends, trinkets and old clothes remain as dust-collecting testimony to her absence.

Last summer, we bought our high-school-graduating son a cool new teen bedroom set. Grasping at straws.  His room is just the way he wants it, with his guitars and ukuleles and amplifiers and posters of tropical beach scenes. Every morning when I come in to waken him for school, I'm intensely aware that few opportunities to see his sleeping face on his pillow at home remain.  Today was his last day of high school.

Before he left, I made him pose for photos in our back yard.  I have the one I took when he went off to his first day of preschool, in his little overalls with his truck lunchbox. In today's photo he carried his computer under his arm and his lunch in a small paper bag.  No more shifting my schedule to pick him up from school.

Those same consoling friends say "But you raised them to go off and be independent!  That's what you want!"  Well, that was supposed to be far off in the future.  Because I like doing all those kid-centric things, like volunteering in the classroom, reading to them, crafts and homework and buying school supplies.  When you're doing all these things with and for your children, there's a special pleasure and connection and pride.  I love hearing them sing. I love when they dance and ask for help and get bored enough to play Boggle with me.  I like knowing they're here at home.

No matter what those well-meaning consoling friends say, when the last child leaves, Mom loses a big focus--and a big pleasure--in her (my) life.  There's plenty to do to fill the time and attention, but all those re-inventions and accomplishments will never be centered around the needs of my own kids.

Then there's the hopeful, "but it gets even better with grandchildren!"  Don't go there.  In my mind, "grandmother" translates into "old."  I do not embrace aging.  Denial isn't just a river in Africa.

So when I hear--or even think about--those measured notes of Pomp and Circumstance, I dissolve.  I wish the graduates of 2010, and especially my daughter and son, pride in achievement, happiness in accomplishment, and fulfillment of all the opportunity those greeting card vignettes of diplomas and mortarboards and world-globes imply.  Just hand me a kleenex, because I hate to see this era end.

Is Capitalism Dead? ...And memories of graduation

Back home from across the country; my daughter now a college graduate. Work to be done.

I'm looking for sources, new or old, asserting that capitalism is dead. With this economic crisis now affecting other countries (China, Japan) far worse than the US, will fledgling efforts instituting free markets sink? Is capitalism dead or, as I maintain, is it flogged down by governments layering on new socialistic band-aids (Obama) that could forever cripple free enterprise? Wouldn't capitalism, if allowed, come to its own correction?

In the meantime, I'm collecting my memories...

Graduation: Mix of Emotions

On Thursday I watched my first-born child graduate college. It was like a time warp.


My son and I flew into New York on a red-eye from Seattle, cabbed to a friend's apartment, and scuttled over to Madison Square Garden for the ceremony. the fact that a sick 20-month-old spent the entire flight screaming in the seat in front of me--and our exit-row chairs didn't budge--gave the whole thing a surreal aura. When my husband met us there, just arrived from Chicago, and finally, in the crush of black gowns, squealing graduates and camera flashes, our daughter emerged from the crowd, my emotions collided, and I could barely control the tears.


This was the little girl who happily let me put the most colorful and playful ribbons in her hair for school, the one for whom I wrote adoring notes to tuck into her lunchboxes. The brilliant student who barely had to study yet succeeded academically as a matter of internal principle. It was like that great scene in "Father of the Bride" when Steve Martin watches the young woman across the table from him morph back into the pig-tailed five-year-old she ought to be.


The other weirdness of it all is the reminder that now I'm on the wrong side of the generation gap. In my own time-stalled mind, I'm the 22-year-old; who is this competent, accomplished young woman with the long burnished hair and sparkling smile? "Pomp and Circumstance," performed fitfully by an invisible college band, paced the procession of perfect-toothed pairs of young ladies, sky-blue tassels swaying off their mortar-boards. As my own child--my baby, my "bachorah," (first born) stepped down the aisle, posing momentarily as I pressed the shutter, I was overcome with the parade of generations, and the transitiion from mine to hers, a segue I resist as well as celebrate.


The ceremony included the usual sweet speeches, an endearing valedictorian, a jocular college president and administrators bestowing honors, before the graduates crowded forward, not in any order, handing in cards from which their names were read. I tried to guage when my daughter would mount the stage to start my video, but all of the young women had identical long brown tresses; we were too far away to see much more. My camera mis-focused at the crucial moment; I captured a blurred form walking to receive the fake diploma and receive a hug from her college dean--an embrace offered few of her peers. Finally the tassles were moved, the recessional finished. A blur of flying satin, grandmothers and nephews and siblings lined with group grins, echoes of "smile!" and hugs and squeals. One by one, the flat caps moved from heads to hands, gowns wadded and stuffed in bags. Girls disbursed with their families; another milestone accomplished.

I couldn't take enough photos. The moment refused to linger. She's irritated that I keep taking images, for me so significant. I just don't want her to grow up; I want to be her protector and Mommy and put ribbons in her hair. I'm glad and proud she's a fabulous writer, a Torah scholar, a competent young woman. But when I think about it, I cry; I just don't want these magical years to end.

Graduation tonight--A Parent's View

The holiday of Shavuos has passed, and though it feels like Monday, it is Wednesday...symbolic. Though I feel like I'm in college, I'm far past that, and, as I cannot grasp that it's already mid-week, I cannot accept that it's also midlife. And the babes who I told not to grow have once again disobeyed. It's graduation time.

Four years ago, my oldest graduated high school. This is an intellectual statement. Emotionally, four years ago, she was a toddler. Now she is taking a fifth year in college; her friends, ones I don't even know, are getting married. One in her small high school class already has a year-old baby. My second daughter is so loving her college sorority life that she regrets it's half over. My baby--now six feet tall--can't wait to get his driver's license in seven weeks so he'll be independent.

I was looking through his high school yearbook at the children whose graduation ceremony I'll attend tonight. Like my son, they have no business completing puberty. And while they will make their folks--my peers and friends--proud tonight, the parents will feel a loss. Been there, done that: It may be a couple of months before their babes actually depart for college, but nonetheless, graduation is no fun.

So, as I leafed through the yearbook, I couldn't help but get emotional. "This is why we raise them!" said the mom of the classmate who already has a baby to me the other day. "We want them to go out into the world and make their mark!" Well, yes, in theory. But inwardly, we don't, because when they leave us, they take a focus we've built since they were born. Though we're busy professionals; though we have deadlines and projects and classes and duties, there's nothing quite like having your child right there at home, safe and fed and cared-for.

To all the graduates, mazel tov! To all the parents...bring kleenex.