Teens Playing Dress-Up

I spot another skinny teenage boy in an ill-fitting rental suit standing with his date, who took a hundred and ten percent more time imagining, choosing, and adjusting her glamourous outfit for the evening. They are with a fancy dressed crew of their peers laughing and acting giddy after all the attention of the day. I feel happy even for the weather – for the warmth of the evening sun setting on these kids as I drive by them, but mostly I feel nostalgic for the fun we had at my own four kid’s high school graduations.

It’s June.  And June makes me think about writing the book, Text Me, Love Mom, and how the tale started with my eldest getting that letter in the mail telling all of us that yes, she would be leaving home to go away to college six-hundred miles from home. As nervous as I was (was she more or less so?) it was hard to fathom.  I was still driving her to piano lessons once a week, reminding her to bring a jacket on cool nights, putting in my two cents about – well – most everything. And she was going to somehow go off and live in a faraway city, (never go to another piano lesson) and get up every day and be part of something else entirely separate from us?

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Yes, of course, she was. As excited as those kids are that I pass on June nights, getting out of limos, or milling in parks in their dress-up clothes, maybe even dishing out money in a restaurant before or after a graduation event – somewhere there are parents whose trepidation and worry matched that excitement. The clothes had been bought and the limos rented by moms and dads who didn’t see how that kid would manage without them – their managers. That gang of youths getting ready to party hard had parents who were losing their concentration at work when they thought about their household ticking along with their son or daughter absent from it. Of course, not all the recent grads will go away.  Some of them will get jobs or go to local colleges, but still life changes.  They’ll stake out used furniture and share apartments with friends, travel to countries their parents have never been too, or find their people in another city.  I know now that they do come home to perch now and again, but there is no denying that this dress-up ritual, and the cap and gown, and late late night parties are part of the threshold to a new sort of family life.

Back in my quiet kitchen, which used to be such a hub of activity, I stare out into the yard.  The peonies have bloomed and are dropping their wide luscious petals, and the dark blue delphiniums reach to the sky. I’m stepping out to water a basket of geraniums on the deck when I get a text from our daughter Lily, who also lives 600 miles away now, “Mom, we’re meeting at the lake on the long weekend, right?”

“I’ll be there with bells on,” I text back and then I send a love note to each of her siblings, “It’s me, just checking in…xoxo ”