You could sense the high school graduation coming…starting that first day of school.
They said it would fly, these eighteen years, but it’s hard to gauge the true gait of childhood until it’s gained so much momentum you find yourself in the last lap.
This whole year has been one long list of lasts — pinnacles reached and milestones celebrated.
There have been senior pictures and senior dinners, entrance exams and final exams, banquets and awards, meetings and rehearsals, convocation and graduation, parties, celebrations and a cap and gown Sunday service.
We moms of seniors have earned our tired and endured a hundred triggered emotions — from heart-swelling joy to head-wagging exasperation.
This year can leave a mom on edge and on her knees.
I’ve launched five kids so far through their senior year and into the next chapter.
You would think high school graduation gets easier, this releasing kids from home.
But each landmark last has tugged hard at my heart.
Those pictures we culled through and picked for the senior slide show? They don’t begin to unwrap the ordinary beautiful that made up his life and mine these 18 years.
They don’t begin to tell the story of God’s grace for a mom who wanted so much for her kids and knew so little about how to get there.
It’s not just my own son’s graduation that’s making me nostalgic.
It’s watching his whole friend group pose in cap and gown, friends who just a few summers ago were sporting sno cone staches from vacation Bible school and piling onto buses for their first week at away camp.
I watch them stand for pictures together, lanky arms across one other’s shoulders with grins as wide as their dreams.
And I want to tell them — breathe it in. Enjoy this fully.
Because I know something they don’t.
This is ending, I whisper silently. It took 18 full summers to get here and it will never be again. Even when you come home from your colleges and get together, it will be great but it won’t be this.
The momentum, at first hardly detectable, is unmistakeable now.
Breathe it in. Enjoy this fully.
I’m watching these kids step from our lives into their own.
I always imagined being a mom as a destination. I knew from the start that there would be release one day, but it was way down the road and I couldn’t see it because I was up to my eyeballs in mom stuff.
Release is here now and release is hard.
All month I’ve wanted to push pause, to stop here for a while and hold on to it.
