My eldest daughter is graduating from high school this year, 2008. It has seemed a little strange as the inevitable year approached and now it is here. The strange thing is that I remember when she was born, in 1990 and thinking that 2008 seemed like such a long way off! How on earth was I going to get this little baby (okay, not so little since she weighed over 10 pounds) to the place where she would be graduating from high school? And what would she be like when she did?
I am not one of those people who confess to not feeling “a single day older”—in fact, while it still amazes me on some days that I am, in fact, nearly forty-one—most of the time I DO feel older. I’ve got nearly twenty years of parenting under my belt and a big chunk of that as a single parent, so I can definitely feel the difference in my age and my nearly-18-year old. But, it is still odd and seems to have sped by way too fast as it is now only a few months before her high school graduation.
We have been doing the college thing—filling out papers, working on getting everything in order—but she is not the eager, organized sort. She just isn’t quite ready to embrace the inevitable change yet herself. While some of her friends have had their college picked out for months or have a list two-dozen schools long that they are applying to, my daughter is taking things at a different pace. She’s narrowed it down to three or four colleges and is filling out the forms in stages. Even though her tendency to procrastinate stressed ME out, I’ve learned after 18 years that she is who she is and she needs to do things at her own pace.
So, we’re taking it one step at a time—she’s adjusting to the inevitable and I am adjusting to the inevitable. I just cannot really believe that the far-off graduation year…2008…is finally upon us.
Also: Time Standing Still (I Wish!)