On May 26^th my son, Porter, was away, so I went to the school for the drive-through yearbook pickup, to make sure he’d have it when he returned that afternoon. It was nothing, one of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of little school errands I’ve run since I put my oldest child in preschool nearly two decades ago. In the high school parking lot I duly reached out my window to the corona-masked volunteers who handed me a graduation program and a yearbook, then I pulled away, stopping at the ordinary, crooked stop sign at the exit. That’s when it hit.

This was the last time.

I’m not sure how I’d missed it coming. Maybe it was the coronavirus upending everything so we didn’t go through the traditional ritual steps, or maybe I did know off in the corner of my brain, but my heart wasn’t ready to connect until just that moment as I sat at the stop sign, Porter’s final yearbook in the passenger seat, knowing that for the first time, there would be no more nitpicky errands, no more rushing in a forgotten project, no more reason to return, at least as the parent of a student.

It’s not that I have any great and sentimental attachment to that particular school, or even to graduation in general. My father was unable to attend my high school graduation because he was traveling for business, for which he apologized profusely. Honestly I couldn’t understand why he felt so badly about it. “I’d be hurt if you missed my college graduation,” I remember saying, “but this doesn’t really matter to me.” My father and I were close then, and we’re close now, so I’ve never expected my relationships with my own children to fade after high school. Graduation was always simply a planned step along the timeline, until it wasn’t.

Porter is my youngest, and it’s been eighteen years since I put my oldest, Abby, into Kiddie College Preschool. During preschool orientation I called her Dolly, as I often did. “Don’t call me Dolly, mom,” she said with clipped exasperation. Maybe it’s because I was pregnant with Porter at the time, but I nearly burst into tears. That was the beginning. Read More