Yet

For the College Graduates of 2024

My oldest graduated from college in May.

When I wrote her a card, I dated it and wrote underneath the date: I guess this day ended up coming.

I’m not sure why I still allow Time to shock me. After all my lived experience of years kaleidoscoping and collapsing, I don’t know why I remain surprised by all that fleets away.

I only know that at every milestone, time and distances conjunct. Inchstones. Milepebbles. I only know that I dropped my daughter off at college a few minutes ago, with a college graduation an impossible amount of time away, locked in the future, not meant for the present or past.

When she graduated from high school, I also couldn’t believe it. And I, to my great detriment, montaged all the years that had come before: a bohemian-dressing preschooler who wore tights on her head like a hat; a kilted elementary nymph who’d walk away from my car at drop-off with pony tail swinging, steady and sure, as if she were horse and rider both; a middle schooler just trying to get through middle school because as a girl, getting through is the only path available in middle school; a high schooler who year over year refined what her future self might do and be like.

I could see all the little hers who had come before as if they were stacked under that billowing blue gown.

But at this college graduation I surprised myself by not thinking about those younger selves nested within and behind her. I didn’t think she’s too little, this can’t be, she’s too young.

Maybe this is because high school had felt shared—getting to that point a mutual effort in important sustenance, transit and sounding-board ways—but college had been hers.

I was a big fan of all of it, of course, but a bystander, or more a far-stander, reliant on field reports from her about classes, friends, what she had for breakfast.

So watching her walk around in another flowing gown, I only thought of her time at this school, what this place had come to mean to her, the astounding ways she had made it her own.

All the people met, all the papers written, all the presentations given, all the little students who’d fallen in love with her during her practicum in a local public school.

All the roadtrips and the good nights out and even better nights in.

All the colds and viruses she’d had and gotten over without my help (because I am this way!).

All the moves behind her. How she’d taken her life and packed it up every year, hauled it to sidewalks and storage and my parent’s 45-minutes-away living room, and then moved it back into a new space, rearranging herself annually as college kids do, making each chapter of a four year novella distinct.

All the times I got to visit, peeking at this vibrant life she was making. Meeting her Everything Friends, the ones you tell everything, and because of that, the ones who come to mean everything to you. The three parents weekends I went to, cheering for the football team, but really there to watch her play. Really there to sing Mr. Brightside in her stands, to know she was across the stadium singing in a congress of SuperFan-shirted eagles.

Really there in greatest hopes of her win.

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Like most of her ‘24 college classmates, this was my daughter’s first big graduation. In 2020, she didn’t get a high school graduation in the standard sense. She never sat amongst close friends and class friends and teammates and acquaintances and the kids she never did meet as names were called in alphabetical order. She never moved a tassel to the left. Never threw a cap in the air. Or posed for pictures with family and friends.

We drove away from her car graduation and took pictures in our driveway.

And then of course she did not have a standard freshman year either. We moved her into her dorm on a pouring-rain day in August 2020 in masks. Only one family member could be in the room at a time so we cycled in for allotted 15 minute stints, each saw the cinderblock rectangle she’d now call home and then all went back outside to hug and cry and hug one more time under umbrellas on the curb beside the open back door of our rented minivan.

We drove away and I got hit by a wave of maternal undoing. I felt as if I’d just left my newborn in a bassinet on a city block. Not because I didn’t think my daughter capable of freshman living, but because what she was about to do felt neither freshman nor living.

She would live on campus but do 100% of her classes online from her dorm. The gyms would be closed, most dining halls too. There would be no football games or fun family tailgates. Clubs my daughter might’ve otherwise joined were just more zooms and who needed that. This wasn’t living at home, but it also wasn’t college.

It was something else. A pandemic penitentiary maybe? I remember waiting for my daughter in the circular driveway in front of her freshman dorm one day, about to go out for our last dinner before I’d fly back to California, and seeing dejected kids sitting on top of duffel bags waiting to get taken away to isolation. A steady flow of health deportations. Months later, when my daughter called to tell me she was positive, I could picture where and how she’d sit waiting for the university van to purgatory. My local parents would try to bring her a care package, a little Christmas tree to plug in in her very bare sequestering room. They would not even be allowed to wave to her from their car.

And still: from these inauspicious beginnings came what we culturally, if a bit irresponsibly, promise: those Best Four Years. Cheated high school seniors and stiffed college freshman arrived back to their schools in the fall of sophomore year to a different campus altogether, as if the entire class had arrived as transfer students.

And little by little, the experience took hold. Football games happened. Friendships solidified. I saw the branches of my daughter’s School Family tree sprout and grow. I saw that deep love take root, the kind that is, if you’re lucky, your best college takeaway. Better than any diploma or award or starting salary. I saw her class dig in and dive in and cram their Best Four Years into three, surviving a dark time, and making a place that had felt at first inhospitable into a thriving community. Into a home.

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All this talk of collegiate living and graduations, but let it be known: my youngest does not support the construct of college. He does not agree that a family should splinter, that older siblings should live thousands of miles away just to…learn? How ridiculous. He gets all the learning he needs easily at his middle school mere miles from home.

This past year, when he asked daily this if his older sister and brother would come home tomorrow, I’d tell him no, and he’d say, “Let me guess: college blah blah blah.”

Living with someone who deeply questions the merits of blowing up your family in the name of higher education makes you grapple with the fact of it.

I have spent four years at times wondering why are we doing this? Sure, society has arrived to this moment and it is the way it’s done, but society has made a ton of mistakes. We end up questioning mores and ways. We end up looking at past beliefs and systems and cringing, wondering what we were even thinking. Everything becomes skinny jeans at some point — a rage, a fad, a mistake. So in 200 years, will our progeny think what were they doing sending the people they love best away from home and all over the place? How ridiculous.

But then you visit a campus. Then you go to a graduation. And you gaze down at row upon row of seated potential, a mass of young people, dripping with promise and collagen. Brains under mortarboards buzzing with ideas.

Everyone movie-star good looking because—and I’m sorry if I sound shallow—youth does this. Everyone glows. I am here to confirm: you can’t be young and bad-looking. Even kids unfresh from being up all night for Senior Sunrise, who perhaps felt like they had just gone and sat on the sun looked airy, perfect, gorgeous.

This kind of youth in aggregate has an inspiring pulse. There is electricity here. An energy that can’t stay contained on a campus. An energy that’s needed out in the world.

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My daughter earned a bachelor’s degree in Elementary Education with a focus on Special Education.

As a born hypochondriac who went on to birth a child who legitimized any and all health worries (making me a chondriac?), I always dreamed of having a doctor in the family. It was both too late and too science-y for English-major me, but I longed for a non-co-payment-required someone to bounce every symptom off of, someone with the knowledge to calm me down or sound the alarm as the case might be.

I didn’t dream of having a special educator in the family. I didn’t know enough to have that dream. I knew about illnesses; I didn’t know about all the many differences a learner could have and that raising someone with these differences would require expertise.

So my daughter’s degree in Special Education is a dream-that-I-never-knew-to-have come true. During her years in college, I vetted a lot about my son’s journey with her. I sent her his IEPs to review. I presented her with his educational knots and watched her untangle them.

Recently, I shared a frustration with her about a way someone was talking about my youngest, how they were focusing not on his abilities, but on the things he couldn’t do.

As a sister, as an educator she didn’t like this limit talk. She said she never understood why people spoke like this about anyone, neurology aside, because you could simply add “yet” to the sentence and change it entirely. Yet is a superhero modifier. You can, with three letters, transform a limit into an aspiration, a hope.

He can’t multiply…yet.

He can’t tie his shoes…yet.

He can’t ride a bike…yet.

This is one of my most favorite things—when I learn something profound from one of my kids. And I suppose it is also another argument for sending our best-loved people to college.

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After all the graduation ceremonies and pictures, my daughter, husband and I, our family’s Original Three, walk away from campus and towards our hotel. It is less than a mile away, around the Reservoir, a circle of tens and tens of running laps of hers and mine. We are all hungry and tired and disoriented. Something big has happened, but now we are just carrying a weird assortment of small breakables that couldn’t fit in bags or boxes. For me, a butter dish that looks like, um, a house. A funny nugget of domesticity, a reminder of the kind of home my daughter had made here.

Back in the room, my husband packs to fly back to San Francisco and my daughter lies down on the bed and is asleep within minutes. Our Roommate Mom text thread fills with pictures of our sleeping graduates. They are, in every way, done.

It turns 7pm and the hotel room, not incredibly well-lit to begin with, grows dusky and sleepy. I have a throwback feeling of traveling with my daughter as a toddler, when she would fall asleep in a hotel room and we’d be in for the night, tip-toeing around and whispering because for as lovely of a child as she was, she was an atrocity of a sleeper and we could NOT RISK waking her.

I get a beer from the lobby and watch college baseball on an ipad, looking over to check on my baby as if she is a baby, like I would’ve twenty years ago, nervous in a Pavlovian way any time she stirs.

The room and time feels cocoon-y and nice, the rhythmic in and out of her deep sleeping breaths, fueling a head and a heart so full of everything this school she is leaving has given her. I watch her knowing she is probably too tired to dream, but knowing also that she has Dreams.

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The day after graduation, my daughter and I drive three hours from Boston to Vermont to help her brother move out of his freshman dorm. She is in no mood. She’s a little bit sick. She might have pink eye. She’s still in a sleep deficit and definitely in school withdrawal. And the more rested she gets, the more the emotion registers.

We roll through rising and falling green hills, conversation rising and falling, talking of where friends are moving, funny senior week stories, whom and what she’ll miss, what and whom she won’t. There is a dimensionalized fullness to all of it that fills me. This is a land of exquisite details and imprintings. After all the flatness of freshman year, she has left that campus saturated in shapes and colors and depth.

“But I’m sad!” Whether she means to or not, she sounds like my youngest who knows there’s nothing quite so purifying as a simple declarative sentence about a feeling.

“I know. It is sad.” I remember this feeling of loss at graduation so vividly, as if I experienced it firsthand days not decades ago. I know there’s not much to say. This is a necessary passage, another thing to get through. But I can’t help myself. I add: “It’s definitely a better-to-have-loved sort of thing though.”

And she agrees. Because she knows: what a privilege to have loved a place and its people this much. How lucky to get to be this kind of sad, to cry a perfectly bookended cry: freshman year not wanting to be left, senior year not wanting to leave.

An undeniable proof of the experience and the memories and the people, all of which she will carry forward with her.

Towards all she hasn’t done.

Yet.

Jen.