Okay, so you want to rock your world, and suddenly feel really old at the same time???? -- Wait, don't answer that---
Colossal life changer #2 occurred just three weeks after little Spence came into the world.
I graduated my first baby.
Mommies, if this has not happened to you yet, let me give you fair warning. Prepare to get your world rocked. Besides all of the memories that you will inevitably visit, you will also take some serious parenting inventory. At least, that's what I did. I really am excited about learning and growing and adapting new phases to my mommy vocation. I've never been a mama to a post grad before, so this is all so new. There are already questions about expectations and letting go, and when not to let go and so on. It's just a lot to digest. So we need grace all over the place over here!
First off, my Belle is a trip. She's hilarious. She has a a bigger than life sense of humor. Give her a little too much sugar and you never know what you'll get. It typically involves some sweet dance moves and such. She sings. Nonstop. And she has all her life. Which is funny since her name means, "little bird" in Arabic. I love to hear her voice. It's very bluesy and jazzy- which is also ironic since her Daddy has always called her that (Jazzy). She is teaching me how to take pictures. She is amazing at it. Seriously amazing. She is also AMAZING under pressure. She snaps into a whole new side of herself. She really is the person that you want in the room in a crisis situation. She's calm and collected like that. ....And talk about sharp?! This girl is a fearless and eloquent debater, and she has Daddy's zeal for apologetics. He's not-so-secretly lobbying that she will study it at Oxford.
We've gone through quite a bit, her and I. She was very easy going in her early years, and thank GOD for that. We moved around quite a bit as I tried to accommodate my student/single parent budget.
There were a lot of top ramen, and .89 burrito-for-dinner nights.
On paper, I didn't do much "right" in terms of being supermama. I was working and going to school full-time, so I basically had to wedge all of my parenting in a weekend-sized window of time. They were sweet weekends though. We'd go down to the coffee shop and split a monster breakfast cookie and chat. Then we would walk home and chalk on the sidewalk, or swing at the park. Nothing fancy, but still...
I had to say "no" more than I could say "yes" in terms of blessing her with stuff. I would drop her off (in my fifteen year old Buick) at her classmates birthday parties with the big house, and the pool and the 2 parents and feel so incredibly inadequate and self-conscious. But, she was sweet and easy-going; oblivious to what she didn't have. She taught me a lot about motherhood in those early years: like the TRUE meaning of
needs and
wants.
So the graduation moment arrives and you ponder these things, and you're flooded with memories of her first Madeline lunchbox, and your eleven dumpy studio apartments, and the make shift cot that she had to sleep on in the computer lab at college late at night, and at that moment you sit back and realize, "Hey! She's OK!" Scratch that, she's better than OK, she's awesome! She's brave, strong, flexible, generous, intelligent, gifted, beautiful and lovely. And those gnarly times were in some measure, tools that shaped her. Talk about GRACE. So this what you get when you're processing all of this stuff and you see her after the graduation ceremony.........(the-eighteen-year-hug-in-the-making).
my baby. i graduated her. o, the sobs!
