Reflections on Senior Year

Clayton's Senior Parking Spot

“The days are long, but the years are short.”

I’d hear that adage in the park, the grocery store, the library. The women who said it were invariably older. They looked contented, perhaps a little wistful, certainly more rested and wealthier. In those days, when the kids were little more than babies and the hours between “video time” and the moment Don came home from work seemed to stretch interminably, the first phrase was the only one that resonated. I knew my own kids would grow up as quickly as anybody else’s, but in the meantime Sylvia was wailing on the floor while Clayton smugly played with the toy he’d just stolen from her. How was one to treasure every moment of this time, when so many of the moments involved at least one kind of bodily fluid, whether tears or pee or vomit?  

Am I now that middle-aged woman in the grocery store? At least I am no longer considering buying gallons of whole milk instead of low fat, so that I can cut the milk with water to save a few bucks. And I try not to look too wistfully at young parents with their children in the upper deck of their shopping buggy, their little legs hanging adorably through the holes. I am wise enough to remember that parenting young children is never as easy as the peaceful moments make it seem. But, lord, where have the years gone? And will time always go so quickly? At this pace, I feel like I’ll be seventy by Thanksgiving. 

And yet there is something about that adage that I would do well to take to heart now. Because although the days do not feel long— there are never enough hours to work, eat, exercise, and sleep— there is a feeling of being poised at the edge of something. The kids are now fifteen and seventeen, but for months— or has it been years?—  it has felt like “almost sixteen” and “almost eighteen” instead. This summer Clayton got a job and then quit all on his own; Danny drives with the laid back assurance of someone with years behind the wheel. But despite everything that is happening now— the class schedule tetras, the senior parking lot painting, the D&D games in the basement, the girlfriends and multi-kid sleepovers and employment deliberations— still there is that sense that we are all waiting for what comes next. In less than three months, Clayton will be voting in the mid-terms; the twins will have their driver’s licenses. School has not even started, and already Clayton has senioritis; he is both antsy and terrified by what comes next. 

Maybe there should be a different slogan for a kid’s last year at home: The days go quickly but the year is long. I can feel us all half-longing for it all to be over: the college applications, the admissions decisions, the trips to the DMV with every document imaginable, plus the Treaty of Versailles. I want to be treasuring Clayton’s final months of official childhood, but the future is calling, and loudly. 

In college, I took a sociology class on education. We interrogated the myth of “the meritocracy” and racial tracking in high schools. I remember that one paper on higher education described college as— and I paraphrase— ‘a holding pen for extended adolescence.’ But how much is that “holding pen” worth? I work at the local community college where in-state tuition is less than thirteen hundred dollars a semester. Students with the Pell Grant walk away with hundreds in their bank accounts; they can’t afford not to be in college. On a daily basis I think about the math. Would my kids be better served by having the tens of thousands of dollars of college tuition saved for a future down payment on a house, a car with no car loan, a trip around the world? But then I come home to the reality of my almost-eighteen-year-old son— the nervous chomping at the bit, the almost palpable energy of “what’s next?”— and the thought of delaying his launch for a few more years feels crazy. I see his girlfriend, who graduated this June, working fifty hours a week at the Starbucks counter of the local grocery store, and it is equally clear— to both Clayton and me— just how much of a luxury spending freshman year at a university is. 

At a rare night out at a country line dance at a brewery, a good friend raised her voice above the music and announced, with no small amount of pride, that she had touched the boob of the country musician we were listening to. They’d been freshman at college together and, pushed together for a photo of their dorm, had been surprised by the feel of the other’s boobs. They poked at each other’s chests to confirm: one’s was more spongey, the other’s like a water balloon. More than thirty years later, her story makes me wonder: is that what college is for? To be set loose among new people whose boobs you may or may not touch, to meet the people who may end up being your best friend or someone on the playlist at a line dance that you’ll tell amusing anecdotes about? 

I remember my own freshman year fondly. I’d gone from being a big fish in the enormous lake of a mediocre public high school to being an ordinary-sized fish in the small pond of the academically elite: an ordinary-sized fish that never stopped worrying that she was actually a rather puny minnow with no business in that pond at all. But, outside of the classroom, boy, was I glad to be there. My hallmate and soon-to-be girlfriend had a feather-bed topper for her dorm-room mattress; it was as good a symbol as any for the occasionally overwhelming feeling of discovery of that year. There were things like feather-bed toppers in the world, girls with breasts the feel of which made my mouth go dry. There were huge armchairs to study in at the library and so damn much I didn’t know. I learned how to Scottish country dance and that I wasn’t as good at physics as I’d thought. I read the war poets of World War I and a biography of Stalin, most of which I didn’t understand. I rode my bike to the apple orchard and hitched rides to swing dances in a nearby town with a grad student whom I ditched as soon as we walked in the door.  I made good grades but never stopped feeling like an imposter. I thought the girls who didn’t shave their armpits were enlightened, and I pruned the word “girl” from my vocabulary as if it were a slur. It was a glorious time, and I never once thought that maybe I’d have been better off with a down-payment on a house. There is no doubt now that it was indeed a holding pen for extended adolescence, but it was a delightful one that, despite its small size, made the world seem infinitely big. 

A few weeks ago, browsing in a curiosity boutique downtown, I came across the sequel to the satirical board book, “Go the Fuck to Sleep.” The title caught my eye: “Go the Fuck to College.” We made Clayton read it in the store, but the intended audience, like its earlier iteration, is clearly the parents, not the child. When my best friend agonizes about her son driving too fast or having sex in his bedroom, I text back, “Go the Fuck to College.” It is the kind of minimalizing sentiment that fits nicely on a curiosity shop coffee mug, but there is something reassuring about it, too, in the way it normalizes the hard-to-articulate feeling that we are all feeling a little over-eager for whatever comes next. 

There are so many transitions coming, I wail to my therapist. My role at work keeps changing. Don is counting down his last few years to retirement. Soon we’ll be empty-nesters! Yes, she says, but not yet. Just be in this moment, she advises gently. I try to take her words to heart. Some moments are easy; I love when our house is full of teenagers, talking over each other with “low-key” this and “bro’” that. It’s harder to cherish the white-knuckled moments in the passenger seat when it is clear that Danny is not the veteran driver that he seems, or when I come home to the sink full of dishes that have not magically transported themselves to the dishwasher on their own. Still, just like those well-meaning ladies in the grocery store all those years ago, I am wise enough to grasp that these months of almost-adulthood that seem to stretch out indefinitely will one day feel like those long afternoons with toddlers. They will be gone far too soon.