First day of senior year: beginning of the end
By Kent McDill
My oldest child, Haley, is entering her senior year in high school.
I’m not ready.
The moment you become a parent, you know these days are coming. The end of days. You don’t think of it then, and you really don’t think about it much between then and the moment it hits you square in the face.
I’m getting slapped around right now.
This is the beginning of the end. First Haley will graduate, then Dan and Lindsey two years later, and Kyle is just six years away. I could spend the next six years crying over the loss of their youth.
The start of the school year wasn’t always a sad occasion. When the kids were in elementary school, the first day of school was a time of great anticipation.
Elementary schoolchildren find out very early in the summer who their teacher is for the next year and who is going to be in their classroom. But they don’t fully grasp the dynamics of the classroom unit until they get in there and start rooting out their social status. Am I one of the smartest? Am I one of the funniest? Who is he? Who is she? And why does the teacher look at me that way?
It’s an adventure; a little bit nerve-racking, but filled with a beautiful sense of expectation.
And there was always new stuff. New backpacks (going from Disney characters to Cartoon Network characters is a big step), new school clothes, new playground equipment, new classroom designs (will the desks be in rows, or in pairs, or in fours? The possibilities are endless). Every year, kids in elementary school seem to need some new, exciting piece of school equipment, like calculators or mechanical pencils or special binders. Every year an elementary school student feels like he or she is growing up, and it is great, and painless.
Every year was a brand new experience for Haley, as the first child in the family. She was the first to experience kindergarten, first grade (also known as real school), fifth grade (king of the castle), middle school, high school.
For the others in our family, who have followed Haley from one school to the next to the next, there is always that McDill reputation factor to deal with. That Haley was always so well-behaved and studious (it’s the firstborn thing; we rock at being well-behaved and studious) weighed heavily upon her siblings who followed her, especially if they had the same teacher.
(Go ahead, ask my sister, Lea. She will tell you how she hated being the follow-up act.)
While there are dynamics to the changes from sixth grade to seventh and seventh to eighth in middle school, and there are changes from freshman to sophomore to junior to senior in high school, they are not cute, adorable changes. They are, in fact, sometimes dramatic, painful changes. There are athletic pressures, social pressures, academic pressures. Your children suddenly care a great deal about their appearance, and nothing is more painful than that for a parent trying to make their children understand that logos really don’t matter.
But there are positive things to anticipate at the start of the school year when the kids get to middle school and high school. Gladly, those anticipations come from academics. Haley is looking forward to her first class in psychology. Kyle has real electives for the first time.
What Haley is not looking forward to is saying goodbye. Like me, she is extremely sentimental, and she knows that she is just a few months away from going off to college, with all of her friends going off to different colleges. This is the last first day of school in which she will know most of the kids in her classes.
That’s scary.
I guess Haley and I can take some solace in the fact that we know this is our last first day of school, in this format. I can pay extra-close attention to her, make sure I know her as well as I can. I can suck up every minute I can with the girl, who isn’t really a girl anymore.
Likewise, Haley can make sure she appreciates every minute of this year. There are big changes on the horizon, but I hope those changes don’t detract from her appreciation of the here and now.
And yes, I will take notes, because I’m going to have to go through the last first day of school again a couple more times before I’m done.
Ÿ Kent McDill is a freelance writer. He and his wife, Janice, have four children, Haley, Dan, Lindsey and Kyle.