It passed in the blink of an eye. One minute you had an eighteen year old, who somehow went from looking old, compared to the other kids in the high school, to looking like a scared freshman again. You remember the way she looked like a deer in the headlights when you moved her into her dorm, or the way he walked with false confidence–a little shuffle in his swagger–when you walked into some stadium or convocation center for the Freshman Welcome!! meeting. And now here you are, four years later, and your twenty-two year old is graduating.
There will be a ceremony, or two or three, and you are so proud. Proud of this person you can’t believe is yours, who suddenly seems old again (when did she start wearing her hair like that? When did he start having an actual sense of style?) and who is, and here is the strangest part, thanking you for coming, offering to help with logistics, and looking for all the world like a real adult.
This is what you imagined graduation would be like
You’ve imagined graduation day: your beautiful baby in a cap and gown beneath a turquoise sky, receiving a diploma in a ceremony so beautiful and profound that you blink away happy tears. Your baby is throwing the tassel to the other side of the cap and smiling at you with gratitude, and then taking your arm and walking to a lovely lunch or dinner at a restaurant known for their rustic elegance and award-winning crab-cakes.
And then the actual day happens.
It rains and the Best Western gave you one queen instead of two and the “complimentary breakfast” is actually just a ten dollar voucher for the pancake house next door, whose prices all exceed ten dollars and which you don’t have time for because you need to be in a stadium across town at seven-thirty AM. T
he two ceremonies you need to attend are hella far apart but there is no parking at either, and your beautiful child, who is in a crummy mood due to lack of sleep and a paucity of job offers, is often off with friends, not answering texts.
This is what graduation is REALLY like
Grandma Hazel woke up with mild vertigo and Grandpa George needs a restroom every fifteen minutes, and the stadium seating is killing your back. And the speech, from a famous and notable person, seems to be about the importance of experimental theater for environmental justice, or justice for those in experimental theater, or theater for experimental justice, but you aren’t sure because the amplifiers echo and you can’t really hear it.
The students all have balloons and beach balls, which offends Grandpa George’s sense of decorum. None of the restaurants took reservations. You called months ago and even though Brad’s Burger Barn, the best you could do, said there “shouldn’t be a problem,” the line is out the door and when you finally get a seat, yours is farthest from the graduate, and Brad’s burgers aren’t nearly as good as advertised.
You look at your phone, and see that in the one picture you got of the graduate and the parents. Your husband is making a weird face. It is difficult not to be mildly disappointed. Here’s where a lot of conventional wisdom would say it is what it is, the most maddening tautology in the world, but I’m here to say maybe it is what it isn’t.
Maybe graduation day is perfect/imperfect in the same way life can be
Maybe it is kind of perfect. Not because you need to set the bar low, but because you’re launching a young person into adult life, and adult life is messy and hilarious if we keep our sense of humor. College graduation itself, the actual day, isn’t perfect, not by a mile, but they do the best they can with an event for thousands of people, and sometimes we have to jump on the bandwagon even when it’s crowded and there’s a balloon in our face, just be part of it, bad seats, bad burgers, bad pictures and all.
Maybe it is kind of perfect, like so many events in these kids’ pasts that were a little rough but somehow perfect: the fourth-grade production of The Lion King when your daughter played the role of “grass,” or the baseball game when your tenth-grader pitched pretty badly but you all went out for banana splits and you got him laughing. Or, say, Christmas. Every year. If I’ve learned anything from three college graduations it’s that perfect can’t be the enemy of good, and good can just mean that your child got a diploma and nobody died.
They did it. You did it. With any luck, you can laugh about it, and get a decent burger.
More Great Reading:
I Begged My Parents Not to Come to Graduation: The Long Road Home
Bio-Paige Duncan Johnson is a mom, English teacher, writer and soloist from Alexandria, Virginia, who still has one college graduation left to attend and is already worried about parking. You can find her at Paigespace.com.
