My youngest child begins her senior year of high school this fall. My oldest child began his senior year 20 years ago. I have been doing back-to-school for a very long time.
We have educated all nine of our children at home — all the way through. And eight have launched from home to college, with the ninth waiting here on the threshold, Common App tab ever present on the computer. (That’s the core section where you fill out the standardized information sent to every college you apply to.) I know how to do this.
Over the many years, curricula, new co-op opportunities, new teachers, new schedules and new worries have all been carefully considered. Once, we made a huge move from Virginia to Connecticut in the middle of a pandemic, and the newness was off the charts. There have been first days when I was certain we were beginning our best year yet and first days when I was already tired before Sept. 2.
And now, apparently, every online ad and nudge have decided that I need advice about having a high school senior.
Everywhere I look, someone is telling me what I must remember to do this year. Take pictures. Say yes when she wants to talk at midnight. Don’t blink. Soak it in. Make memories. Remember that there are only so many Fridays left, so many dinners around the table, so many ordinary mornings before everything changes.
In all seriousness, I do not need to be reminded. I know. Dear Lord, how well I know.
But 20 years after my first senior year as a mom, I think of you — maybe doing this letting go for the first time. You do not have to make this year perfect. You don’t have to squeeze meaning out of every moment because the moments are running out. You don’t have to turn ordinary Tuesdays into memories while you are still living them. I think we’d both do well not to carry the acute awareness of endings into every beginning.
We can simply live this year.
One of the surprises of parenting for a long time is discovering how rarely we recognize the important moments while they are happening. The conversation you will remember might happen while you are unloading groceries. The photograph you will treasure might be the blurry one someone took when nobody was ready. The thing your child remembers about senior year might be something you thought unremarkable.
Love has never depended upon our ability to curate it well. That is worth remembering whether your child is beginning kindergarten or senior year. There is enormous pressure on parents now to get childhood right. We are supposed to provide the right education and the right activities, cultivate the right habits, notice every need, preserve every memory, prepare our children for the future and somehow remain fully present to the fleeting beauty of today.
It is too much weight to put on a school year, too much for a mother to bear. And, mercifully, it is not how God asks us to live. Jesus tells us not to worry about tomorrow because tomorrow will have troubles of its own. I used to hear that mostly as an admonition against anxiety. These days, I hear tenderness in it.
You only have to live today. This bright, glorious, hopeful first day.
Pack the lunch. Drive the carpool. Sign the form. Apologize when you lose your patience. And know that you get to begin again tomorrow morning.
There will be days this year when you are wonderfully present and days when you are distracted. You will make some good decisions, and you will regret some poor ones. None of this means you missed childhood.
After all these years of first days, I think this is what I most want you to know: childhood is not something you have to clutch tightly before it disappears. Parenting is not one long countdown to the last time. It is a relationship that will keep unfolding. God willing, you have plenty of time to keep doing life together.
The child who goes to kindergarten comes home again. The teenager who walks across the graduation stage keeps becoming someone you keep wanting to get to know. The young adult who leaves home returns to your kitchen, sits at your table and tells you all about all things.
Of course, there are losses as children grow. There are doors that close and seasons that really do end, but there are also doors to open that you cannot yet see.
Twenty years ago, my first senior began his last year of high school. This year, my youngest does the same. I am trying not to tell myself to hold on. Instead, I remind myself to unfurl my hands in hope and in surrender.
Here is this child. Here is this year. Here is this ordinary Tuesday morning in late August, given to us by a God who has always provided grace for the day we are actually living.
We don’t have to preserve it.
We can simply receive it.
Foss, whose website is takeupandread.org, writes from Connecticut.
