Graduation Thoughts

Hi Friends. On Tuesday night, my younger son graduated from high school. This made me feel much older than my 50th birthday did. I am now a person who no longer has school-aged children. I’ve left the school communities that I joined in 2008 (and 2018). In a lot of ways, I am relieved to be done with all of that, but another part of me feels sad to see doors close behind my children.

After reciting the litany of incredible challenges the class of 2024 faced, student speaker Paris Robertson said, “I’m glad we don’t look like what we’ve been through.”

I’ll be honest: I don’t think they got the best educations they could have gotten. A lot of that is traced to external forces like poor leadership, COVID, and teachers’ strikes, but some of it was also me and my husband trying to fit square pegs into round holes. Some of the teachers and school leaders my kids had were also inflexible and disinterested in getting to know the children in their care. Another piece of it belongs to my kids and their varying levels of willingness to take advantage of the choices they were offered. I’m relieved and sad and disappointed.

One of the speakers at the graduation noted that this was “commencement” which means to begin something new. My husband reinforced that to my son on the way home: “This is a new beginning. Everything that happens now is up to you.” We’ll be here to support his decisions, but those are his decisions to make.

My high school graduation was very different from his. My graduating class was 55 girls, all dressed in white dresses and white gloves, holding a dozen red roses.

“Sounds like Handmaid’s Tale,” remarked Quinn’s girlfriend.

“Yeah, creepy,” he added.

I didn’t feel creepy in the moment but it did feel ceremonial in a bridal way, as though whatever path we took from high school would lead to our marriages, either to men or to the Church. I wasn’t thinking about marriage or even my future at my high school graduation. I was focused solely on the fact that my father had crashed the ceremony against my explicit direction. It was emblematic of a lot of my life: my father asserting his wishes, which I would find a way to accommodate. It was often hard to figure out who I was because other forces brought so much pressure to bear. The Church, my father, the rest of my family, boyfriends, my own insane expectations.

Growing older is a process that involves trying to figure out who we are. I thought I would have it figured out by now, and I’m getting there, but probably only because it’s a lifelong process and I’ve had a lot more life than I did when I was 18.

I realized this morning that figuring out who each one of us is, or figuring out who I am, is not innate, but a series of choices in a large number of categories. What is my style? Who are my friends? Who is my partner? What are my hobbies? What are my beliefs or my faith? How do I choose to show up for people? What are my boundaries?What is my job? Where do I live? How do I move around (both physically and transportationally)? How much time do I choose to dedicate to each of the areas of my life?

There are probably other categories but the main thing about figuring out who I am is asking if I’ve exercised my choices in each of these areas. The choices aren’t limitless, of course - it’s a menu, not the whole world. Some of the choices are proscribed by my physical or mental abilities, and exercising some choices are more difficult than others. Exercising a choice in one area can impact the choices available in other areas.

The goal for learning who we are is to exercise our free will in each of the areas we have the freedom to move in. With some caveats, we have close to maximum freedom right now, which means that there are more areas of choice. It’s hard to know who we are with all these choices to make. The payoff is more gratifying - the more choices we make, the closer we are to really knowing and being ourselves.