Spring Marches On

In the past month, my daughter turned 30, and I visited the church where my son will be married in the fall. Bittersweet, these milestones evoked a flood of parenting memories and prompted feelings of getting old. The seemingly trite and not particularly profound sentiment, “where did the time go?” rattled around my head and heart. Thirty years of raising a daughter who has embraced the family education business with wisdom and courage and a son who has found someone who adores him and embarked on his path with an unfamiliar entrepreneurial spirit has passed at an unexpected pace. 

The rhythm of the academic calendar, the only calendar I have known, offers a familiar cadence by inviting the refreshing opportunity to redefine oneself at the start of each year. Admittedly, for a teacher, it can feel like Groundhog Day: the sixth grade is always the sixth grade—lockers are assigned, uniforms disappear, and Rome is built in a day, year after year. As a parent, however, this steady march picks up swiftly, and our role in our kids’ lives evolves and recedes with our hopes and fears fueling their independence. The pace can be terrifying, the changes mortifying, and still, I wouldn’t have wanted anything else.

I was reminded of all this the week before spring break during a series of evening events with current and future parents. In the span of four days, I spent time with our senior parents and the parents of our incoming kindergarteners. The former, wizened veterans, were textbook examples of the adage that in parenting the days are long but the years go by too quickly. And those newest to our community radiated the idealism that lights up a room as the sun rises on the horizon.

JWB