Class of 2009

Whenever possible and especially when the occasion is a truly special one like it was today, I will not hesitate to embarrass our children.

I believe it keeps them humble, builds their character and is a great source of amusement for my husband and I.

It’s nothing major, mind you. This morning, all it really consisted of was marching our 13-year-old daughter Amanda out in front of the house and making her pose for pictures. When you’re 13, it doesn’t take much.

My intention was to duplicate the photo we took of her and her father on the first day of kindergarten, today, on her last day of eighth grade.

 I remember that day in the fall of 2000 very well, especially the part where I chased the bus down the street weeping. No doubt the bus driver remembers it also.

Three years later, when it was time for our son Alec to begin school, I was considerably better.  I had no fears of putting my baby on a strange bus with a strange man behind the wheel to be whisked away to a strange school, because I had Amanda.

“Watch your little brother,” I instructed. “Take care of your little brother.”

I only said it about 20, 25 times. And imagine my surprise when the school nurse called about 15 minutes later to inform me that Amanda was in her office with a stomach-ache.

“You made me so nervous,” my eight-year-old lectured me when she got home that day and for years afterward.

Such is the burden on the first child, the guinea kid in the parental laboratory.  We swaddle a little too tightly, nap a little too strictly, don’t let them eat dropped food and by the time they’re about 10, they start giving us that look that tells us they know we’re amateurs.

But we plow along, taking our pictures and trying to act like we’re in charge.

So when did it happen? Was it sixth grade or seventh or just this past year when I looked at my little girl and a teenager looked back? When it became clear that the foundation had been set and that it’s now largely up to her what kind of person she chooses to become?

Tonight, as they came marching in to the first strains of Pomp and Circumstance, I watched as they walked by and I saw them as pre-schoolers – Adam with his vivid imagination and Jason with his mischievous grin, Alec’s seriousness and Samantha’s innocence.

I listened as the school superintendent told them they were not just our future but our very hope for that future, that in the coming years they would be learning technology as yet unknown, to perform jobs not yet invented, in order to solve problems of which we were not yet aware.  

It is what kids all over the country are being told this week but these were our kids. Our babies. And there they were, the junior high graduating Class of 2009, walking back past us with all of the confidence and conviction of burgeoning adults.

We caught up with Amanda in the cafeteria afterward and lined her up for picture after picture. She was, of course, somewhat mortified by her parents as was every other graduate in the room.  But then that’s our job.

And I knew the cool was a façade. I knew that even in the midst of the can’t-wait-to-get-out-of-junior-high fever that had overtaken her and many of her classmates these last few weeks and months, there was something they could not deny.

It hit Amanda and her friend Jamie as they walked home today on their last day of eighth grade near tears before turning around and giving the school crossing guard a hug goodbye.

They know what we know.

That there’s no going back.