The school year is finally over! We survived starting middle school, changes in friends, repeating kindergarten, over-volunteering - all of it with our sanity (mostly) intact. And while I am thrilled to be at the start of my favorite season, I realized this joy I am feeling is also tinged with a little sadness.
I think it's alway been this way since my kids were in school. I used to think it was just the stress of the end-of-the-year nonsense that caused this slightly negative undercurrent come June. Things like making cupcakes for the end of year parties (no nuts! no dyes!) and buying teacher gifts (is a Starbucks gift card OK for the custodian who let me in the school after hours that one time?) can drive you mad when all you want to do is crack out the beach umbrella and head to the shore already.
Then it dawned on me. I am actually grieving a little bit at the end of every school year. I am mourning the people my kids were this year. The people they are now will be distinct individuals in my memory and they will be gone. Never again will they be a kindergartener, a 4th grader and a 6th grader. When they are grown and one of them says, "Remember that time in kindergarten?", my mind will conjure the chubby-cheeks and dimpled fingers and miss that child as if he or she were not standing right in front of me.
The end of the school year marks the passage of time way more than birthdays ever could. Moving up ceremonies, and mini-graduations with their construction paper mortar boards and "Pomp and Circumstance" bleated out on plastic recorders, bulging backpacks containing the contents of emptied desks, the tattered evidence of a year's learning providing us with crayon and pencil evidence of our children's growth - all of these things are mile markers on our kids' road to adulthood. And the trip is going too fast. Maybe that's why I throw myself into summer with wild abandon each year. Having been reminded on this last day that time is quick and sneaky, I try to wrestle it to the ground and make it stay still for eight weeks.
So welcome, Summer. If the end of the school year is the end of an era, let this season be a celebration of what was, what is yet to come and of RIGHT NOW.
Stop the clocks, let the days roll with their own momentum.
Pause. Be.
