Nobody told me that elementary school graduation would be this traumatic

 

No photos in this one, I'm trying not to share kids images any more on a wide open platform like this. 

Hello friends, it's been a few years since I had any kind of substantive update on the twins, but they basically operate on auto-pilot these days anyway. Take heart, new parents, especially parents of multiples, it does actually get to be pretty fun after a few years of just trauma. 

This blog was created to remember and memorialize the landmarks and achievements in the kids lives as they developed. Things that I knew I'd forget over time. In that sense it has served its purpose. Sometimes, however, an event kicks you square in the teeth and it's something that you know at the time you'll emotionally lose track of in the future. I want to remember those events, or at least have a callback to those feelings for that time not far from now when we watch the taillights disappear as they go to build their own lives. 

They leave elementary school this Friday. Elementary school graduation is one of those events that non-parents scoff at and cynical people mock. After all, how big of a deal is it to "graduate" sixth grade? The answer is that it's not a very big deal in the grand scheme of things. But in the little scheme of things it seems like a lot. 

We moved to this neighborhood in 2013 because of the school. It was where we wanted our kids to go. In that first year in the neighborhood, we'd walk or drive by the school and point out to the kids in their car seats the "big school" that they'd be attending next year. It seemed unbelievable that our small fragile children would be tossed into the meat grinder of a school! It was exciting but also came with its collection of anxiety. What if they didn't make it? What if they got hungry, or needed to go to the bathroom? Would they make friends? Would they be sad?

They started kindergarten in the fall of 2014. Our daughter has been there since then. My son started with her but moved over to another school two years ago. You can walk this blog back to when this started. I was 38 years old and was part of a group of parents in our neighborhood who were sending their first borns to kindergarten. Tears and hugs, uncertainty and the new freedom of having our local public school take care of our kids during the day. 

The parents came together too. Friendships forged over daddy-daughter campouts and my double dipping into the father-son campouts too. Most of us were new parents, just figuring shit out as it came up. Some of the dads were older and had been through this all before. Old salts that had a confident calmness to how everything went down. Many days and nights were spent over a campfire or at a mass birthday party back in the days when everybody was invited where the parents forged friendships with previous strangers. We were all brought together by our shared experience. 

The pickups in those days were fun. Mass afternoon gatherings of the parents, most of whom we knew, because the only parents who were picking up their little kiddos were in our group. The other kids at the school were so *big* - like people. They got dismissed through the far door - the "old kids" door - at the school. And they went off on their own when they were dismissed. No parents, no pickups, just these growing young adults who were giants compared to our kids. 

Years go on, and the new routine of the school becomes old hat. The fundraisers, the auctions, the drinking events, and the non-drinking events. We became experts at all of it. The new parents that came in behind us were so young, and so ignorant about how this school operates. We got grayer and older and eventually developed that calm confidence that parenthood and time teaches you. Our childrens' friendships fractured into the predictable cliques. Unfortunately that took down some of the antecedent friendships between those kids parents that looked promising once upon a time. 

Our kids started walking to school. When we did drop them off, they didn't require the hugs, or the reassurances, they just went. We still had birthday parties and events with friends, but not in that grand forced gathering way that it was when they were smaller. Those forced gatherings served their purposes, and we moved into our little bands within our tribe. 

Covid messed up a lot of last year, including the spring break that ran from March 2020 through the end of the summer. When we started back, our daughter did virtual classes for the first semester. When we returned to live school in January, she went in through the "big kids" door, the one farthest away from where all the parents were dropping off their little ones. She'd go in with her classmates, kids that I've known now for almost seven years, and they're all so big. Not grown, mind you, they're all right on that doorstep for the first significant kick in the ass for when your body and hormones tell you that life isn't all fun and games, but they're giants in comparison to the small children hopping out of their parents cars and marching up to the door that our kids used to march up to. Years ago. 

After Friday, she won't ever go to this school again. She's going off to another school next year, and not even one that her classmates are heading off to. For the rest of her life, she will never again be in an academic institution for as many consecutive years as she was at Moss Haven Elementary. The consistency of the last seven years, the calm knowledge of how it all works, the society of the children and parents, it's all about to change. I fear how that will change us, as parents, as our kids go off to schools outside our neighborhood. I trust that the group that was around when this journey started in 2014 will always feel the bonds that this experience brought us. 

This has me reflecting a lot on the prior post on this blog, the one about my mother's house. We're getting older, not the kids, the parents. The neighborhood continues to turn over with younger and younger people moving in. People with babies or very young kids who are about to start school at the same place. People who are exactly like we were seven years ago. 

Those parents are about to go through a growth cycle that only this experience can give you. As much as our children learned in the last seven years of schooling, I really believe we as parents learned more. First, and most importantly, we learned how to be parents over this time. How to adjust, how to be patient, how to use kindness when anger feels like the thing you really really want to use. But we also learned how to be better neighbors, and how to be a part of a community in a way that really wouldn't have happened if not for the forced society that our kids brought us into. 

We have no more kids, this chapter of a "parent of elementary school kids" is now gone in my life and will never return. I'm surprisingly sad at this. There will be no more school events with this group. All those times of thinking "this will be fun next year" are gone, because there isn't a next year. My daughter's volleyball team has been together for four years now. They just played their last game as a team. They'll never play together again with that team. Her softball team, which has almost all the same girls on it as it did when they started five years ago, will play their last game together tonight. Those girls have grown up together, forged friendships and broken others. Both her softball and volleyball teams enjoyed the enormous sports privilege of being league champions. 

And now that chapter has ended. 

These things sneak up on you, parents. Enjoy the little things. The walks, the campouts, the birthday parties that you're only attending because everybody in the class got invited. Enjoy the dropoffs, because before you know it, they won't need them any more.