Words from WW Blog

WORDS FROM WW May 23, 2010

Today is one of those days! Depressingly celebrative! Joyfully sad!
Lizi, our youngest child, receives her college diploma. It’s the culmination of four years of hard work and applying herself. And now today she walks!
Why downcast, O my soul?
Call it “the dad syndrome” or “fatherhood flu”, but it comes as a dad reflects and remembers…
…the day of birth (Carol and I watched several episodes of M.A.S.H. and played two games of Scrabble as we waited in the birthing room. Scrabble strategy you never hear about: Play against a pregnant woman in labor. Her words will get shorter as the game goes on and she will care less and less about winning.)
…eating birthday cake for the first time- kept the hose close at hand.
…first day of school etched in our photo album. (The missing front tooth will always give it a special flavor.)
…swimming like a fish.
…Buddy Basketball dominance.
…kicking the “For Sale” sign down in front of our house in Mason, Michigan. (The next day it was not only kicked down again, but also dispatched underneath a pine tree hoping not to be discovered.)
…making intelligent decisions in situations that many of her friends didn’t.
…getting baptized, and Dad not being able to finish it because of all the emotion.
…Prom.
…seeing her developed sense of justice and compassion appear in a number of situations.
…taking her to college that first year, and experiencing synchronized crying with Carol within a mile of leaving the parking lot of Lizi’s dorm.
And so today as she walks to the front of the platform and receives her diploma, I’ll be proud and also a little sad. I long for those days when she was still on the slide and swings, but know that part of parenthood is the growing of the child to come to the point where, in some ways, she doesn’t need us to catch her any more. It’s a fulfilling moment that we receive with hesitation and dread.
Oh, to keep them as children! I’d better stop. The tears are heading towards my eyes!

This entry was posted on May 23, 2010 at 3:45 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site.