Columnist Lisa Pampuch
’s recent reflection on how the new milestones of her children
related to her age a couple weeks ago beat me to the punch. I’ve
been thinking of little else the entire month of August than how
much older I feel now that my oldest has started her senior year of
high school and my baby, six feet t
all, started 8th grade.
Columnist Lisa Pampuch’s recent reflection on how the new milestones of her children related to her age a couple weeks ago beat me to the punch. I’ve been thinking of little else the entire month of August than how much older I feel now that my oldest has started her senior year of high school and my baby, six feet tall, started 8th grade.
Although my children are older and bigger, I’ve not really felt old until very recently. I seem to have developed some kind of “processing disorder.” It manifests itself by my reading, at first glance, headlines and signs wrong. For example, the other day, a newspaper headline read “Bush Nets $1 Million in Cocaine.” Recently, I passed a sign on a building in San Martin that read “We Repair and Install Turbine and Submarine Engines.” Or so I thought.
In fact, the headline was “Bust nets $1 Million in Cocaine” and the shop repairs “Submersible” engines.
It doesn’t take long to make the correction, just a quick double-take. However, I always seem to experience an attending split second flash of absurdity. In these cases, I wondered just what the heck our president was going to do with all that cocaine, and if there were submarines in Lake Anderson.
I don’t know how such a disorder will impact my ability to assist my children this school year, as one chooses a high school to attend (Bellarmine College Perps?), and the other begins the college application process. I can’t even think about that.
Over the last 20 years, things seem to have ratcheted up a notch. The application process to private high schools is similar to when I applied for college. I went to a College Information Night at my daughter’s school last night, and learned detailed information that led me to figure out why applying to colleges and how to support the teens in this process is virtually the only subject discussed among parents of seniors. Spreadsheets for deadlines and responses. A college application list of six to 10 colleges? Yikes!
Since she was born 17 years ago, I have never felt so much in a parenting “no man’s land” as I do now. Not yet an adult, she needs guidance, but would never admit it, nor accept it if given. As our parents didn’t go to college and didn’t know what to do to help us, my husband and I did the entire process on our own, instructing our parents to sign whenever anything required their signatures.
Thinking that we could do more for our daughter with our experience, we looked forward to guiding her through the process. However, she has rebuffed most offers for assistance. While she did consent once to go on a self-guided tour of USF, I committed the egregious transgression of asking questions of a parent in a passing student-led tour group that abruptly ended her interest in the place.
Soon after, I told her in a fit of pique, “Fine! We did it ourselves, you can do it yourself.”
But it seems too soon to think about college. For her, we are simply praying for a boring, uneventful year that will end with her graduation from high school. Each year since she started high school, she has lost someone close to her heart. In fact, she has faced many adult issues: death, failure and the momentum-stopping “what’s this all about anyway” much earlier in her life than I did.
I find it very difficult to watch her suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, but also the consequences of her own actions. Sitting back is hard, but I must. In the long run, I know these early experiences with adversity will help her become the adult we were charged by God with stewarding. But in the short run, I vacillate between celebrating the survival of junior year, and turning up my radar in order to detect any other things coming down the pike.
My mother always said the high school years would streak by. For me, the first three seemed as interminable as toddlerhood. However, I know this last year will end before I know it. And I hope I am ready when she is ready to leave the nest, to build a life on the foundation provided by our entire family and the life lessons that weren’t swallowed easily.
Columnist Dina Campeau is a wife, mother of two teens and a resident of Morgan Hill. Her work for the last seven years has focused on affordable housing and homeless issues in Santa Clara County. Her column will be published each Friday. Reach her at dc******@*****er.net.
