Junior year was definitely my favorite year of high school: I was finally settled in enough to be able to help freshmen open their lockers and give wise-sounding advice to sophomores about how their grades didn’t define them, plus I no longer had to take PE, but I didn’t yet have the stress of college applications or the looming bittersweet sadness of graduation.
I figured the same would be true of my kid, who is now a junior in high school. She’d survived her awkward freshman year, battled through a tough sophomore year, and emerged on the other side as a confident student who had found her niche … and yet didn’t have to start thinking about leaving home just yet.
What I didn’t count on was that for me, anticipation is actually almost always worse than whatever it is I’m anxious about. So while my daughter is enjoying her junior year, I’m quietly wiping my eyes in the background and trying to put on a brave face because I’ve realized that this year is the last of everything not being the actual last.
This was the last Halloween that I didn’t have to think of as the last Halloween. The last Thanksgiving that won’t be the last Thanksgiving. The last summer that won’t be the last summer.
Am I overthinking this? Oh, absolutely. But what do I not overthink?
I’m realizing now, too, that some lasts really are happening this year. Her last round of course selections. Her last “Important Dates for Next Year” page. Her last re-registration.
I have visceral memories of her infancy. Of being so tired I fell asleep at a red light. Of being at the grocery store soaked in baby vomit. Of beaming when the doctor said she’d gained 2 pounds. Of mastitis and colic and pacing the floor at 3 a.m.
I have visceral memories of her toddlerhood. Of her chubby hands. Of her chasing bubbles and laughing. Of ruining more than one pair of my pants by skidding across the ground to yank her back from whatever dangerous thing she was trying to do. Of tantrums and mischief and endless rounds of, “But why, Mommy? But why? But why?”
I have visceral memories of her early grade school years. Of class snacks. Of birthday parties. Of reading logs. Of dance classes and school assemblies and weeping with pride when she said her lines perfectly in the school play.
I have visceral memories of her middle school years. Of best friends … who then weren’t best friends. Of making honor roll. Of not making Student Council. Of school dances and sleepovers and crushes.
And then … COVID. Who doesn’t have visceral memories of that? Of wiping down groceries. Of masking everywhere. Of Zoom baby showers and bar mitzvahs. Of long walks and jars of sourdough starter and socially distant porch visits.
So now here we are … 17 years from her birth, 15 years from her toddler years, 7 years since she graduated elementary school, 4 years since COVID, 3 years since she moved on to high school after a weird virtual eighth grade year.
It all feels like yesterday. All of it.
She’s going to prom this month. We’re visiting colleges. Over the summer – her last not last summer – she is going to leadership camp and doing a service trip to Costa Rica. She is no longer the baby I carried in a sling, just under my chin, and tried to soothe with whispers and badly sung lullabies.
And yet she still is. She always will be.
“Oh, honey, cherish every moment,” an older woman told me at the Target checkout line back in 2007 when I was holding my daughter on my hip and had to keep bouncing up and down because if I stopped bouncing for even a second, she would start wailing again. “It goes so fast.”
I smiled thinly at her. I hadn’t slept more than two unbroken hours in months and I was so tired of bouncing and singing and pretending to be a vaguely functional person instead of a sleep-deprived shell of my former self.
All I could think was, “Oh, please, God, let that be true. Let it go so fast.”
And we all know what they say about answered prayers, right?
For more Eve, check out her blog “Joie d’Eve” on Tuesday mornings at myneworleans.com
