It's fine. I'm fine. Everything's fine.

I’ve never been the mom who wants time to stand still.

Not once.

Not even at my kids’ littlest and cutest and wildest. Not even when I could still dress them up and they still needed me to sing them to sleep and their young lives were idyllic and they had yet to know heartbreak and we knew how good they had it and knew it couldn’t possibly last forever. Not once did I want to stop the clock. Not once did I want to hold them in place. I’ve somehow always loved the tension of being present in the moment in one hand and the constant curiosity about what comes next in the other. Who are they becoming? What will they be like next? What will their next milestone bring?  Oh how far our maps have taken them, but where will their own paths branch out and diverge and wander off on their own?

Every next age has been my new favorite, every next stage my new hope - the next thing I’d been raising them toward. Because that’s the gig, right? Raising them. Growing them up. Launching rockets (R.Bell). Not catching them in a glass jar to keep them close, but letting them fly a little more every day. But it’s also true that I’ve not wanted to stop time because we’ve survived some gut-wrenching seasons, where no one in their right mind would want to stay for a moment longer then they have to. The seasons of trauma and rooting down and staying with themselves and healing slowly, bone by bone. The hope of what’s next getting us through. The belief that better days were ahead keeping us afloat. Not wanting to stop time for fear it might swallow us whole.

It’s graduation week. By the time this post runs on Friday morning, I will be waking up with the sun and making my coffee and my firstborn who just turned 18 and registered to vote and got her first tattoo, will have graduated from high school and will still be fast asleep. It will be the first morning of the in-between where the summer after high school but before college nestles into the cracks to just breathe for a minute. The summer where coaching water polo and a little grad trip will bookend the tasks of cleaning out her closet and collecting a pile of things she will take to college starting with the pink “GET NAKED” dorm room bathmat that just arrived from her Auntie Al. This in-between where we get to walk the dogs together after the sun goes down and watch season two of The Summer I Turned Pretty and go track-by-track through Speak Now Taylor’s version discussing every detail of the songs from the vault and have our evening chats until her next milestone hits and we move her to college.

It’s fine. I’m fine. Everything’s fine.

But truly, it is.

I have been raising her for these moments since day one. Maybe more accurately, she has been raising me for these moments her whole life.

While I have been whispering over her and reading to her and teaching her and cheering for her and grieving with her and believing in her and building into her the deep intuition to trust herself, she has been raising me into the mother she needs. The mother who, when the time comes, will let her do just that - trust herself. Again and again. Moment after moment.

I always think back to how, from the time she could hold her own head up, I would hold her on my hip and she’d push one hand against my chest. Never wanting to be held too tight, always needing her space, she’d push away to look out at the world. And even then I’d smirk and nod, ok little one, I see you. Fiercely independent from the jump, I have been following along after her from a distance just waiting to see what she does next. I’ve never wanted her to stay little. I’ve always wanted her to fly because it’s who she has always been.

That’s the gig, right? Letting them show us who they are and then having the courage to give them what they need.

However that may look forever remains to be seen. Her choices, her mistakes, her victories. All the versions of herself along for the ride. All the plot twists we never saw coming. All the character development and narrative arcs that reveal themselves precisely when they mean to. All the scenes that get spliced together to make a life. There is no one way to fly. Even now as one thing ends and another begins.

By the time you are reading these words, she will have walked the stage and tossed her cap and I will have shed a few tears (or maybe more) and whistled with my fingers (thank you TikTok) when they call her name and her neck will be stacked with leis and her arms full of flowers and we will have taken all the photos and I will hold her for just a moment and no one will see it but I will feel her push one hand against my chest to look out at her world all over again and I will love her for it knowing time flies and we blinked and this part is complete and everything will change and nothing will have changed and all the cliches are true but nothing is over because she’s just getting started and she’s been flying this entire time.

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FIVE FAVES

(graduation edition)

1. The opening manifesto from Rachel Cargle’s new book A Renaissance of Our Own: A Memoir & Manifesto on Reimagining. I dare you to try to get past the first page without feeling inspired to write your own.

2. This scene from last week’s Ted Lasso episode for all of us when we have to find our courage.

3. Monogram rings like this one I gave Carsyn for graduation, like the one I received when I turned 16, which I like to think of as the antithesis of the purity ring - a reminder that before we can belong anywhere else or with anyone else, we must belong to ourselves.

4. The GET NAKED bathmat Allison sent Carsyn to kick off her dorm room decor.

5. This new arrival at Trader Joe’s from the same Brazil Nut scent we’ve all been obsessed with to the point they had to put a limit on how much you can buy at one time.