I’m sitting here in a cafe watching out the window as a parade of goslings march across the parking lot let by a gaggle of parent geese. They navigate the mostly empty asphalt in front of a not-open-at-8am restaurant, and then a couple minutes later are dashing out onto the main drive holding up the cars and trucks on their morning commute out of the neighbourhood.
It is an apt metaphor for the last twenty-four hours of my life, I realize.
Yesterday evening we attended the first of two granduation commencement ceremonies for The Kid who will be—is—already technically has graduated high school this year.
The first ceremony, the one last night, was a smaller and more intimate affair with just the hundred or so kids who successfully completed the language immersion program and will be graduating next week with a French diploma.
There were tearful parents, thousands of photos, cake, silliness, and congratulatory handshakes.
We’ll repeat it next week on a larger scale will the full class, but the fun one—the one where I knew enough of the kids who had been through all thirteen years of school, the one with the gaggle of parents were a big group of familiar faces from years of field trips, sleepovers, birthday parties, drop offs, pick ups, and on and on and on—that one is blip, and done.
I’ve been thinking a bunch about parenting lately. I mean, for about five years, tho lost to the buried archives of time and privacy those articles are long gone, I actually wrote a parenting blog. It was not an advice blog. It was a reflective, parenting philosophy blog. It took me down some interesting paths of thought and ideas and implementation of both. If only I could go back in time and tell the guy writing that blog that simply overthinking all those ideas was worth it in the end.
And then I wrote a parenting blog of another kind. For a couple of years I posted a weekly comic strip over at www.piday.ca which was me drawing art and making commentary on the trials and troubles of being a dad to a kid who was about ten years old when I created them. I literally just spent a few hours over the last week restoring all those comic strips to a new website and in doing so re-read every single one making me wonder why I ever quit making them. They were not great, but they were pretty good.
In a week that same kid will be graduated.
In mere months that same kid will cease to be a kid—in as much as she will be able to vote, buy booze and make decisions for herself.
I definitely know that parenting never really ends, but this week… this month… this summer is definitely a major milestone in my parenting journey, maybe as consequential as I remember feeling about this time eighteen years ago.
Those little geese will be off and out of the nest in a month or two. And then the parents can get back to doing whatever they do best—pooping in the grass and squwacking at bikes and honking at five in the morning as they take off into flight. I feel you, you angry birds, I feel you.
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