I wanted to tell her to stop complaining and enjoy it because
some day – far, far sooner than she thinks – she’ll be begging for each
15-minute segment of holding him and shushing him to sleep.
I know this because tonight my oldest will graduate. I will watch her walk across the platform to
collect her diploma. On Sunday, she will turn 18. A few months later, she will
head off to college, never again to be wholly mine.
I swear she was a baby yesterday.
The years whipped by faster than I thought they would.
Phases I thought would last forever proved as temporary as the bubbles she used
to blow in the backyard.
The struggles, the celebrations, the losses and triumphs
that at the time were so vivid and overwhelming seem to blur from the speed in
which they flew by. I blinked and she grew up.
But I’m getting a do-over of sorts. When she walks across that platform tomorrow
night, I’ll be sitting in the audience, holding my infant son – her spitting
image – on my lap.
I get the chance to see the same smiles and the same impish
gleam in the same big eyes in living color and not Kodak color.
It’s a strange thing to begin with one child at the same
time you are wrapping up with the first, simultaneously parenting at both ends
of childhood. You see the fruits of your labor in one while planting the first
seed in the other. Reassuring and daunting, all at once.
I won’t complain when, like Monday night, I am up until 12
a.m. until 2:15 a.m. trying to get him to go back to sleep when he wants to
socialize. I’ll hold him and marvel at his rosebud lips and long lashes. I’ll
pat his back and stroke his chubby, dimpled hand and store the time away in my
heart.
Because tomorrow he’ll graduate.