Edit 43:Reflection
From ‘The Almost’ to ‘The After’
Graduation arrived in a blur of red caps and gowns, dresses carefully steamed, ties adjusted at the last minute, cords and programs laid across kitchen counters, and phones overflowing with photographs we'll keep forever. For weeks, the house had been full of lists and schedules and reminders, emotions running high beneath the surface of even the smallest conversations. And then suddenly, almost without warning, it was over.
Not the love of it. Not the pride. Just the chapter itself.
The strange thing about this season is how the joy and the grief seem to sit side by side without canceling each other out. One moment feels almost cinematic: your child crossing a stage, hearing their name called into a room full of applause, watching teachers and mentors smile at the person they've become. And the next moment, you're standing in a quiet kitchen the morning after, staring at folded programs and wilted balloons and realizing the house itself feels different somehow.
Not empty, of course (because it isn’t). Simply changed.
In so many ways I think motherhood is a long practice in learning how to hold contradictions simultaneously. How can your heart feel impossibly full and quietly broken at the exact same time? How can you feel deep relief and deep longing in the very same breath?
Because these past few weeks—the last one especially—I have felt all of it.
There were moments of enormous beauty: The laughter, the celebration, the jazz award handed down with the weight of history behind it. The hugs, the photographs, the feeling of watching someone you love step fully into themselves while knowing you had the privilege of witnessing it all.
There were also the quieter moments no one photographs. The exhaustion. The tension that sometimes comes with endings and transitions. The tenderness of realizing that everyone in the family is carrying more emotion than they necessarily know how to express.
And somehow, all of it belongs.
The whole thing.
The messy, sacred, beautiful weight of loving someone long enough to watch them walk toward a life that no longer fully belongs to you.
For weeks the season moved faster than my feelings could follow, but this morning, they finally caught up.
This morning the house was quiet in a way I could feel physically. The kind of quiet that settles into the walls. A chapter closed here this week—it wasn't anything dramatic, even though it felt that way at times. It felt more like the turning of a final page of a book you helped write, and as you close the cover, you realize the story was even better than you knew while you were living it.
And now we stand in that familiar in-between space again. The space between what was and what comes next.
I don't know that I have wisdom about it yet. I think I'm still inside it, still letting it settle around me in its own time.
But I do know what a privilege it is to love someone through every version of their becoming.
And what an extraordinary thing it has been to witness this one.
