Tomorrow at 4:30. Can it really be?
Survived the Senior Breakfast, the Prom Photo Op and the Pre-K Reunion – and the 50th birthday of one of my youngest friends. Now it's the night before graduation…and the Neurotic Parent Institute has documented that even the least neurotic parents in the grade have become basket cases.
Some ubiquitous developmental issues:
- Spending hours going through photos, posting them on Facebook, emailing them back and forth, choking up about not just how cute your grad was…but at what a young-looking mom you once were.
- Agonizing over whether to give the grad a gift (in addition to the requisite $2000 computer…and the $200k college education.)
- Discovering in horror that your prom photos are blurry and you need a new camera
- Doing hours of online research about which camera to get
- Deciding at the last moment to self-publish a book for your grad because you're not the scrapbooking type and you have 18 years of memorabilia stacked up in large industrial tupperware containers. So you spend hours selecting precious art works and research papers to include in a gift from the heart…but then you realize that it will be a lot easier to do a photo montage.
- Abandoning the montage idea because choosing the music proves to be too much to handle emotionally
- Deciding at the last moment to write a poem for your grad…but getting stuck when it comes to the tone: should it be comedic (for him) or poignant (for you)?
- Being interrupted from your poetry writing by a group of 18 hungry Lakers fans who have stopped by unannounced to watch Game 5.
- Realizing suddenly you have nothing to wear, especially nothing that looks good with flats (no heels allowed on the turf)
- Calling various parents of the Class of 2008 for advice about what time to arrive and where to park.
- Developing what you think is stress-related carpal tunnel syndrome and finding out it's stress-related pre-arthritis.
- Accepting that not only has your baby grown up, but that suddenly you are the mother of…an adult.