My Daughter Graduated High School and I Did Not Dissolve Into a Puddle and Evaporate Into the Ether

tl;dr: proof of life, something has shifted, and you can't have too much cheese

Hello!

Writing to you from the bowels of my basement where I am trying to escape the 100+ degree heat wave while my kids are all slumbering upstairs, minus the one who is living Her Best Life™ this summer and is currently at the beach right now with her high school friends (though I would bet lots of cheese money on the fact she’s also still asleep).

I’m in regular contact with my own high school friends (thanks to Marco Polo in these last handful of years) but, as it happens, if we don’t hear from someone in the group for a few days — or after a big event — we ask for Proof of Life: you don’t have to say anything or explain, just show us your face.

For ex. they wanted a POL after I went hiking alone on the anniversary of my mom’s death a few weeks ago.

Given the very real and overwhelming emotions I felt leading up to my oldest’s graduation that I’ve written about here, I thought I should POL myself in this space, too. So many of you reached out with kind words and encouragements from my last posts and I just want to say thank you and let you know: I made it.

We all made it.

It’s no secret that I was in my feelings before graduation.

But I DID MY BEST to keep my feelings about me and what I went through — which was all devastating, traumatic, and very sad — wholly separate from my feelings about being a grown-up mother whose daughter is graduating and leaving for college in a couple of months. (Which, in and of itself, is also really really sad.)

Was I a total mess? Yes …

And also … No.

You see, like I’ve said before, I started going to therapy two years ago to process a lot of unresolved stuff I’ve carried with me through the years. I actually didn’t go for that reason, but that’s what ended up happening. And what I’ve learned more than anything else in my time on that couch is that PAYING ATTENTION to what I am feeling, acknowledging it, naming it, and not rushing to get past it, but sitting with it — as hard as it is — does a heck of a lot to unburden you in the long run.

With help, I was able to look my experience as an 18-year-old in the face, cry over it, invite trusted friends to bear witness to the pain — and also the baffling timing that God allowed this year: that I’d have a daughter who was graduating 28 years after my experience — and the days would line up — and that this graduation, my daughter’s, when I was the mother, would feel sad, sure, but that it would also end up feeling a heck of a lot like redemption.

The other thing that helped? Fixating on the amount of cheese I should buy for the graduation party the weekend afterward.

As a reminder, I am a first-generation American. And despite not having the Serbian influence directly from my mother for most of my life, I still have Serbian aunts and cousins and in-laws and friends. Blood is thick. Besides drowning or being lit on fire, my next greatest fear is not having enough food for my guests.

Which is why, thanks to the other moms who hosted the party with me, we had an insane amount of food, which included so many pounds of cheese left over that we ate it for days on end.

But before all that, I woke up the day after my daughter’s graduation, days before the party, and drank a cup of coffee (decaf, that’s who I am now), and had one overwhelmingly profound thought:

I’m here.

I’m guessing I’ll also feel this same way when I turn 49, the year my mother never saw.

But there, cradling the Taylor Swift mug Nadia and I share, tears once again sprung to my eyes — they’re never that far away. Because it felt as if something in my body had changed, as if there had been a release. A release of something I didn’t know I was physically holding onto, and wouldn’t have been able to predict feeling lighter without.

(“This is what regeneration means,” my therapist would tell me later. Embodied new life.)

When my daughter woke up that day after her graduation and I hugged her good morning, it was like fresh eyes — almost a fresh me — met her.

I SAW HER GRADUATE.

I GET TO SEE HER GROW UP.

EACH COMING DAY FEELS LIKE A GIFT.

I didn’t realize this was also a fear I’d held onto for so long, so deeply that I didn’t even know it was there.

We are currently living in the chaos of summer swim + unstructured time + Mom actually has a job so needs to work! but our family (read: mostly me) is preparing for a Big Trip™ which, as those who have experienced deep loss understand, and despite all the logistics and worry, feels like the sweetest, wildest, craziest thing.

Can’t wait to share more with you when we return.

Ciao!