I’ve just returned from the last-day-of-school assembly, which featured a slide show of the kids and the many events that took place this year, as well as a send-off for the fifth graders. Each fifth grader received a certificate, kind words, and many rounds of applause. Afterward, they lined up in the hall outside the cafeteria to receive congratulatory handshakes from all the kids, the teachers, and the fifth grade parents, who were specially invited to watch this rite of passage.
My daughter is one of those fifth graders. For about an hour longer. She is very much looking forward to the new horizons of middle school, and with the busyness of this week’s end-of-the-year celebrations, she isn’t focused on the finality of this good-bye. But of course her mother is.
As I write this, I am recalling a visit with my grandmother about 8 years back when my son was a baby and Leah a toddler prone to violent tantrums. I was awash in diapers, baby food, dirty dishes, tears, and broken nights, and often I was ready to snap. But on that cloudy morning, not unlike today, as I chatted with my 91-year-old grandmother, who was debilitated by bad hearing, macular degeneration so advanced she couldn’t see faces at all, and the general malaise of a 91-year-old body, and yet still able to laugh at a funny story and cuddle a squirming baby, she said something that has stuck with me.
She said, “These are the best years of your life. These are the golden years. ”
This from a woman who had lived her life, a very full life, and who was closer to the end than either of us knew. Who had more perspective than I’ll ever have, and who could see more clearly than I could where I was in my life with my babies.
Whenever I am passing through the entrance to a new phase of my children’s lives, as I am today, I think of her and those words, and how fast our parenting years move.
And I wish she could have been there today to clap for Leah. She would have been so pleased and proud.
These are the best years of our lives.