This essay is part of the Between Chapters project, inspired by the book. What chapters are you between? How did you get from one chapter to another? Share your story here.
What Chapter Are You…
Leaving:
Fourth (and last!) child about to cross the high school graduation stage.
In:
A house full of young adults who are in the process of becoming.
Entering:
The one where I finally get to be the guest.
I was not ready in September. Not for the senior portraits, not for the college applications, not for the particular way she walked out the door that first morning of twelfth grade like she already knew it was the last time. I told myself I still had time. Months of it. A whole senior year still ahead. I was wrong about what that would feel like by spring.
Last May, while my youngest was counting down to prom and yearbook signings and a senior boat cruise, my oldest daughter walked across her college graduation stage. And then something unexpected happened: she and her friends had planned the entire weekend themselves. The brunch for the graduates and families. The celebration at one of their apartments before heading out into the night. The itinerary, the reservations, every last detail, handled. All I had to do was arrive.
I did not realize until I was standing there, someone’s guest in a life my daughter had built largely without me, how much I needed someone to take the clipboard out of my hands. It was freeing in a way I did not see coming.
What followed was a night none of us will forget. Hand stamps. Moms and dads at the karaoke mic. Grandmothers, aged eighty and seventy-four, singing along from the crowd almost all night, because why not? The sheer, uncomplicated joy of being alive and together and proud.
At some point near midnight, surrounded by people I had only just met and already loved, I could finally feel it: this chapter of motherhood was actually closing. And to my sentimental surprise, I could finally bear it.
I have four children, spaced every two years like clockwork. My oldest turns twenty-four next month. The youngest, my baby, who carried a Peppa Pig backpack with her best friend through senior year as an homage to their preschool days, will receive her high school diploma in a few weeks. Twenty years of school mornings coming to an end.
Mothering children through these stages was hard in ways I could not have anticipated and would not trade for anything. There was the child who had to be gently peeled from the car by school staff some mornings. There was my son’s senior spring, when the world shut down and swallowed the year whole. There was my dad, who lifted that same son onto his shoulders on the first day of kindergarten and carried him all the way to school, but who passed away four years ago and won’t be here for the last high school diploma.
And there was Tim, my husband, who coached pee-wee soccer and lacrosse for years after school and on early weekend mornings while our oldest daughter trailed along the sideline with him, dead serious about a job no one had officially given her. She wasn't even distracted by her newborn sister wailing to be fed in the shade next to the bleachers.
Those were the moments I held onto. I knew, even then, that they were the ones that mattered.
The chapter I am leaving is the one on which I built my whole adult life: the school calendar, the permission slips, the particular exhaustion and fullness of being needed in the way children need you when they are small, and then young, and then, almost gone.
The chapter I am entering is quieter. The sounds from the sidewalk outside our house are from other people’s children now. And I am happy to wave as they pass.
But if that graduation weekend taught me anything, it’s that the next chapter doesn’t announce itself. It just shows up in a karaoke bar at midnight, singing along with three generations of families and friends, until you slowly realize that you are not approaching the end of something. You are starting all over again.
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