Wife and Mommy

Today’s guest post was written by my dear friend Heather.

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I shook my head as I wrote the check and winced.  $30 for graduation from preschool, for a cap and gown?  And they want me to buy portraits?

Really?

I grumbled about how rampant commercialism has become since I was in school;  back in MY day we had ONE graduation, and that was from public school!  Now there’s preschool, kindergarten, sixth-grade, eighth-grade and high school.

I was still muttering as I walked into the center to pick him and his younger brother up.  “Did he tell you?” the center director chirped, as Tornado bounced up to me. When I shook my head, she told me that he had been selected to say the Pledge of Allegiance at the ceremony.  Smiling, she admonished him to practice, as the big day was two short days away.  On the car ride home, I casually asked him to recite it, wondering how in the world we’d get him ready in two days.

Then he began to talk.

His little chin lifted up, and, in the middle of exhaust fumes and gridlock, my son carefully articulated the Pledge, even sounding like he understood it.  To be fair, he stumbled a little over ‘indivisible’, but other than that, it was spot-on.  My heart swelled with pride and I felt ashamed that I had doubted him so completely.  Once home we called the grandparents, put them on speaker, and he seemed to stand an inch taller with every recitation.

I reflected as I put the dishes away.  Rites of passage are one of the threads of society, and why should he be denied the acknowledgement of what is, for some, the first great change?  In six months he’ll be out of the bubble of relative security and into the world of homework, curse words and learning.  Life will stop being simple in September.

That evening, we sat on the deck in the cool air and he practiced his lines with his father and me.  To my surprise, he asked questions about the Pledge itself- what was a ‘republic’– is it like Star Wars?  What does ‘for which it stands’ mean?  An impromptu civics lesson came about, and I finally realized he was ready for kindergarten, all thanks to a preschool graduation I was grumbling about for a little boy I greatly underestimated.

I suppose it’s not just him that’s getting the education.

Tempis fugit.