How fast it goes, from firsts to lasts. We're in the home stretch, now, of that particular run that is your oldest child's life at home. She leaves for college in less than a hundred days, and is spending her time on lasts. Her last gymnastics meets with her high school team, then her club team, then ever - with the state senior nationals team in Florida. Her last high school classes and tests, with graduation in just a few days. And all the other lasts, including the family ones we like to think about least. We went to dinner the other night at a favorite place in Needham and I wondered, walking afterward for ice cream, was it the last time we would do this before she goes off to the rest of her life? Sure, she'll come back for a summer, maybe two. But it will be different then.
I am going to try hard to focus on the firsts and not the lasts, in all the good ways. In all the ways that my life got so much bigger when I went away to college. The first time you really live away from the house you grew up in. The first time you really make decisions on your own, ones that matter. The first time you sleep all night in a bed with someone else. The first time you start thinking, for real, about what you might want to be in this world besides a student. And all the other firsts.
It's all in front of her. And all of a sudden. It's hard to believe that seventeen years already have gone by since that Saturday night and on into Sunday morning, when the world ground slowly, painfully, finally to a complete and jolting stop. And for a moment, just a brief moment, everything was absolutely, perfectly still. And then the world slowly started turning again. And everything, every last thing, was different. She was born September 26, 1993, at 6:43 a.m.. When the world started all over again.
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