I had so many things I wanted to say. So many memories I was ready to share, so many thoughts to which I planned to give voice.
In the end, I cried.
I cried a great big ugly-face cry and said… not much.
The gathering was intimate, hosted here on the farm and compromised of truly treasured friends and family who fold themselves into the tapestry of moments and remember, forever, with you. People literally drove half a day to spend a few hours celebrating with us, only to turn around that very evening or the next morning and make the return trip. As always, it was deeply humbling to be wrapped in the kind of love that sets aside everything and anything to say, “You matter. This matters. I’m willing to be inconvenienced to be a part of this moment with you.”
We felt the keen absence of Washington friends whose hearts would have had them here if at all possible. The morning of the graduation, I texted my best friend and joked that I was still expecting her to show up, and her response summed it all up: “I knew I wouldn’t be there… but I should be there!”
We handed him his diploma under a pole barn, with siblings and grandparents and aunts and uncles and friends and chickens looking on.
And then it was done. He was officially graduated from high school.
I guess I could have pulled him aside later, after our little casual ceremony, and said all those things I had thought I would say. I could have told him how grateful I was that the Lord had chosen me to not just be his mother, but to be his first teacher as well. I could have told him how I’d never forget the first moment I realized he was going to be a writer (it was when he was two and correctly used the word “ominous”). I could have thanked him for the crash course in the function of probability distribution, or the primer on the pros and cons of various translations of Beowulf. I could have reminded him of his “life verses” (Joshua 1:5-9).
But I didn’t.
Instead, I posed for a photo with my father and brother. I hugged people I love. I watched my little ones run through the grass with their great-aunt, and my strapping teenage sons kick a soccer ball in the side field with one of their grandfathers and their great-uncle. I smiled and I laughed and I grabbed on to as many moments as I could, knowing it would be gone in an instant.
Which, of course, it was. The day had to end, as beautiful as it was. And as I collapsed, exhausted and happy, into bed, I turned to my husband and thanked him, again, for allowing me to have had twelve hard, magical, amazing, priceless years to walk alongside Mathaus as his primary teacher. He gave me a tired grin and reminded me of the truth underlying the whole day: the pleasure, he said, was all his. But the gift? That was all God’s.
Which was exactly what I had planned on saying all along.