The day after Rebecca’s grad and if there was ever a time to say that I have conflicting emotions, it is now. How can something so celebratory also feel so heartbreaking? How can an event that represents the future feel so final? There is nothing like a momentous occasion in your child’s life, to remind you of your own “big days”. The interweaving of my memories of my high school life, with reflecting on Rebecca’s school days has been an emotional odyssey.
Psychologists say that the things in life we remember the most are those things that elicit in us our strongest emotions. Additionally, a handy but tricky device our minds plays on us is to fill in lost memories gaps with, for lack of a better term, "false memory mind shit”. In my memory, high school was not as happy a place for me as it has been for Rebecca and although I do attribute some of this to the fact that I have filled in lots of gaps with generalized typically-ugly-teenage-angsty fluff, I often wonder if it could have been better if I had know some of the things I do now. Like, for example:
Even the most confident looking kids were fighting battles and some of them were protecting broken hearts and closed–door atrocities with a sheen of bravado. And, (granted,easier to see after a 30 years hiatus), the least loveable kids were the ones most needing the loving. I hope with all my heart that they have found the love they so desperately craved.
The labels that were given to me, and labels I gave to others, even the positive ones, were limiting, repressive, thwarting and injurious. Some kids spent years trying to live up to a label and others spent years, and for some, lifetimes, trying to live them down.
Troubles, tribulations, broken promises, and pain are all the grit in the shell that one day produces a pearl. Sometimes it really sucks waiting for the pearl.
Everyone is so busy focusing on their own life, their hair, their zits, their screwed up family to really notices anyone else’s; this is freeing. Nobody really notices that you have a booger hanging out of your nose, or you have tripped in the hall. Well maybe they do notice but they are so damn glad it wasn’t themselves that they instantly love you.
Rebecca will look back one day and wish that there were things she knew too. But, for today, she is looking at the future, not the past, and for today I am at peace with my journey since high school, grateful for all I have learned and even more grateful that there is still so much more to learn.
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