Moon

I am now the parent of a high school graduate. I am not entirely sure what that means. The earth has shifted these past several months. Orbits have realigned. It’s hard to make sense of all the things pulling at us these days.

Ours has been a less than traditional route to our children’s education. Both Zachary and Jonathan have been mostly homeschooled their entire lives. That has created tremendous flexibility, allowing the boys to chase interests as they arose and insert field trips on a whim. They learned basic math by playing Dino-opoly. Zachary developed his language skills by reading (and re-reading) Harry Potter,. For the sake of broadening their understanding, we spent God knows how many hours in museums and zoos and concerts.

The trade-off for flexibility is clarity. How do you know when education is finished—when it’s time to graduate? The answer is, of course, that you don’t know, because it never is. Denise and I wanted our boys to develop more than competencies. We tried to instill in them a desperate need to know the world, and we provided tools to help them in that pursuit. Even Zachary, a newly minted adult with all the self-confidence that comes with being 18, knows his education is far from complete.

Still, the calendar has turned to May, and his peers are donning robes and turning their tassels. And so last weekend we had a party—one of the most successful every thrown by a Van Meter, I might add—to celebrate his graduation. We played games at ate amazing food from our favorite Peruvian food truck (props to Buenisimo). The next afternoon, family gathered for a three-minute ceremony in the back yard in which Zachary walked across the back deck in a borrowed robe to receive the diploma his mother created for him. He opened presents. We had cake. Then he took a nap, and before long almost everyone else did too.

Anticlimactic? Yes.

Somehow fitting? Also yes.

We are born as one with our parents. It takes time and effort—and not a little bit of family tension—to learn to differentiate from them. Somewhere along the way, however, we separate. Over the years, we become something like the moon, orbiting our parents in close proximity, whether in or out of view. In adulthood, the dynamic shifts again. We transform into binary stars, orbiting our family as equals, even as we depend on one another for stability and reference.

It’s exhausting, all these gravitational shifts. Hence the naps.

I have been through these transitions now as both child and now parent. Last weekend, as I watched Zachary’s grandmother celebrate his graduation, I thought of the way she and I have moved across each other’s skies for nearly five decades, through joy and hope, disappointment and trauma, the crippling uncertainty of life as a human. Not long after I graduated high school, I remember her saying, “Look, I get it. You are ready to grow up and move out. But you aren’t the easiest kid to love right now, and I wish you’d just try a little harder to be patient with the rest of us.”

Almost thirty years later, I said virtually the same thing to my eldest.

Turns out it’s never easy, growing up. Not at any stage. Not for anybody.

Still, there are moments.

On Sunday night, when all the partying and ceremony were over and the family had left for their own homes, Denise set up her telescope on the deck to watch the lunar eclipse. We got there a few minutes late, and the shadow was already creeping over the moon’s surface. For the next half hour, she and I took turns looking through various filters on the telescope, marking changes to what we saw. Just as the eclipse became total, Zachary brought two of his friends over so they could see too. It was not the coolest or most beautiful thing any of us had ever seen. Still, it was cool. And it was beautiful, and also rare—a moment in a weekend full of moments to remind us of our connection.

When everything in the universe seems to be shifting, sometimes it helps to simply look up and be amazed.