Do Not Go Gently
May 30, 2020
We watched the masked graduates strut across the empty stage, shaking hands with no one, high-fiving the air, woo-hooing and waving at parents in parking slots #3 or #5. From our stuffy cars, fireworks exploded over the drive-in screens. Graduates celebrated with closest family only, beloved grandparents, aunts and uncles streaming the ceremony at home. It was a tidy reflection of the Now, an uneasy harbinger of the Next.
Born during the anxious times of 9/11, graduating in a pandemic, the class of 2020 — a term which denotes clarity or sharpness of vision — seems best suited to march forth into the maw of this erratic world.
Life is a compendium of extraordinary circumstances and our little Aughties – and their parents – have seen plenty.
Any way you slice it, raising a child born in the early aughts has been plenty terrifying already.
Finn’s dad would tell you the scariest moment of his life was strapping our scrawny five-pound newborn into the car seat and driving him home from the hospital. It was the loneliest, most disquieting time in a parents’ life. We floundered. We figured it out. Mere weeks later, we looked past our newborn marveling at his tiny fingers and watched the twin towers fall in real time.
Generations before this class saw plenty of trials and uncertainty, too. A colleague of mine recalled his canceled college graduation when the Kent State shootings rattled campuses nationwide. Finn’s grandparents lived through the Korean and Vietnam wars, a presidential impeachment and resignation. A previous generation lived through the Great Depression – where we are likely headed – and World War II.
Is this Now any different? Fear and uncertainty of different hues is still fear and uncertainty. During Finn’s life, dangers were more virtual, more phantom and moved with unprecedented alacrity. Compared to generations past, here the challenges were more insidious, wilier, invisible. Like a deadly virus.
Pandemic has been a lesson for us all as we watched our leaders navigate the Next. These lessons should serve this class well and we’ll rely upon the clarity and wisdom born of 2020’s namesake.
Finn’s generation was the first to hold the worldwide web in the palm of their hands, forcing us all to keep pace. They paid for school lunch with an imprint of a finger. A scan of a face unlocks their phone. We managed to get them graduated safely with no school shooting, though — if our school officials were honest — our children experienced the realities of in-your-face drugs and violence daily in school hallways. All frightful events outside our control, the canary which parents may choose to ignore at their peril.
Joy followed our Finn but so did plenty of nail-biting, second-guessing and hair-pulling. We prayed each time he left the house, particularly when the words “lake day” were involved. We gave thanks upon his return.
We swung from unfettered idolatry as we boasted and beamed as to every swing of the bat, every recitation, every recital. That’s the thing about parenting. So in love with our children the itch to catalog and capture the very you-ness of you never quite scratched.
We used this year as an adulting test drive. Since our graduate entered his senior year as an 18-year-old, he had to give his parents permission to see his grades. Ironic, because we graciously gave him permission to let us pay for college. The part of a male teen’s brain regulating judgment still at an all-time low but showing signs of improvement. Our graduate is easy-going, clever and erudite, and has been that way since birth.
Just as we consider his accomplishments – state champion debater, all-state musician – quietly amassing soft skills we nonetheless quietly fret whether we did enough, too much, too less, what will stick? Will he pick the right tool for the right job at the right time?
The pandemic has been a gift too, allowing us precious time with this boy we otherwise would not have. Given the wild celebratory times that define the end of a senior year, it might well have saved his life. So we pucker up, open the barbed gate and un-tether you, our sweet Finn, unburden your yoke and set you free.
You are ready to go. We’re ready to let you.
