This past month has been so chock full of stuff over here that looks an awful lot like markers, even I, an amateur hobbyist explainer, can't explain it all away. My youngest one graduated high school yesterday. My oldest one graduates college in about 10 days. All the kids have had birthday in the last 30 days. I've got my own birthday stuffed in here somewhere. And it's all right here on the tail end of the longest sustained period of Nothing Going On So Might As Well Ovethink in post-industrial human history. I should be primed for an especially gnarly anxiety piano to drop on my head after so much time and global effort to lift it slowly, steadily into so high a position over the sidewalk that runs in front of the building that is MY VERY SOUL.
The one saving grace is my beautiful, invisible middle child who just continues to be a college student, as he was last year, as he will be next year, breaking through no barriers between modes of existence. Middle children are holding this whole planet together.
Weirdly enough, though, I'm not thinking about myself as milestones go. I'm not turning a particularly interesting or meaningful age. Who has ever said "you know what really got me was when I turned 47. That was a lot." Nobody notices at all, unless you die when you were 48. Then people have my permission to attach too much significance to the upcoming twelvemonth. I'd make a glib remark here about how I have no plans to die this year, but given how the last year went for more than half a million of us just in America, I'm going to save glibness for less serious topics like global warming or abortion.
With no kids left at secondary-or-below education levels, I have to say how surprised I am at how proud I am about the whole thing. High school, I objectively know, is dumb. The way we do education in this country is a baffling combination of high effort, high cost, high stress and low output. We spend the most money on it but still are in, like the 40s in math and science ranking. And this is after taking everything joyful or interesting out of education (literally all arts) and making it only about math and science over the last 20 years. But we're also the same country that outspends every other country on defense by orders of magnitude yet somehow can't muster the bodies to defend its own Capitol.
High school is not that hard. Except it really is. It doesn't end up meaning that much. Except it kind of does. The triviality of it is retroactive in every, every case. Context is a luxury that smooths away jags and pits of surviving something everyone told you was the absolute key to your future, a claim you couldn't have possibly have lived long enough to have the experience to dispute at the time. Yes, you don't have any bills (some of us) or kids (some of us) or work (some of us), but you have to lug around the mercury millstone that is your potential every second of every day; having it evaluated and measured and evaluated again on a semester or quarter or monthly or weekly or daily basis. The whole thing is shot through with the message "if you don't get this right, what can you expect to make of yourself?" And this starts at fucking 14 years old.
None of my kids are going to Harvard or Stanford or Oxford or even Berkeley. They all got into state schools,** but I'm a full-up combination of relieved, excited and grateful for them. I hated high school. Every embarrassing, breathing, ticking second of it. A lot of the reasons for that were diagnosed (literally and figuratively) later and I could put a layer of forgiveness and grace over it that makes it not easy to look at still, but at least something I could safely ignore forever. Things that are nonviolent and mostly safe can still be trauma if your brain decides they are such, which can be a trick to learn to leave alone, like an itchy scab over a wound too wide to actually close.
But they skated through it, all three of them. As a parent I was always prepared to have to deal with the psychic beatdown of the late adolescent experience, but they all just kind of... got on with it. Like everything else I only had my own experience to build expectations from, only to have them set aside as pleasantly unnecessary. Now, a whole lot of chaos and hurt might come manifesting out in the next 5-10 years, but if I can get them through college and into the workforce, odds are it will be their romantic partners' problem by then. A milestone for another day.
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*I know this will be weird for Americans to consider, but we're also the people who call our domestic sporting league winners "world champions."
**And all ended up at the same one, in fact, by odd coincidence
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