Freeze frame

My baby graduated from preschool yesterday. Despite all my claims about being ready a few weeks ago for that day, I'm not sure I really was. Because no matter how much mental preparation you do, you're just never quite ready for that final letting go, for the hands on that huge clock in the universe to click forward one more notch, marking the passage of yet another milestone in your child's life. I had my emotions more or less together yesterday morning until a fellow mom from T.'s class came into the chapel holding a round-faced toddler in her arms. Then it all came rushing to me: memories of myself holding my own toddler T., and watching L. graduate, his white cap bobbing tenuously on his head. I realized, too, that I couldn't remember too much about that day--what L. was wearing, or how he looked when he walked across the platform for his little rolled up certificate. I couldn't remember, and the sadness of that fact, coupled with the fresh bittersweet sadness of that morning, made me cry.

At least I wasn't alone in the sniffling, teary-eyed pews of parents (I think I caught Scott sniffing) and grandparents. And while many parents still had one or two more babies to graduate from there, at some point gloriously distant in the future, there were many of us who were marking our last preschool graduation. I think we had a little extra burden to carry; out joy was like those shells you find at the beach--beautifully pink and perfect on one side, but on the other, discolored and rough.

While we waited outside the chapel doors to be seated one grandmother put it best: "I must have blinked one time too many," she said, nodding wisely to us. "Because one minute my grand-baby was two, and now he's heading off to kindergarten."

We all must have chorused an amen to that at her words. I don't mourn the passage of these milestones--I celebrate them, pride wells up in me. I grew teary when the first white tooth poked through my children's gums; felt a lump rise up in my throat with the first wobbly steps, the first pictures they drew, the first I love yous, the first I hate yous, too, because those always come. We parents get pretty good at swallowing that lump in the throat, the one that's painful and hard like a rock sometimes. But I think what I rage against the most sometimes is just how quickly the moment does go by, and how it so quickly ends up buried under the avalanche of what comes next. While I don't want to stop the moment from happening, I do want to pause it from time to time--make it a freeze frame, something I can hold and examine, cradle in my hands, and greedily soak up every detail. I want the time back again; in ten years, or twenty, or fifty. I want the guarantee that I'll remember it then, just as keenly and beautifully as I lived it now.