Empty Nest: He’s Graduating. I Almost Crashed the Car.

I didn’t go to my high school graduation. It took place in the early seventies—a.k.a. that angry extension of the late sixties—and I boycotted, for reasons that remain murky to this day. My absence had something to do with protesting the war in Vietnam and just about everything and everyone else on the planet. My parents didn’t care, because they were not inclined to sit on any bleachers in Texas in May anyway. When I was in 2nd grade my father made me sign a paper stating that I would never make him go to the Cambridge Elementary School annual PTO Mexican supper again; let’s just say he wasn’t joiner.

I inherited some of my parents’ aversion to joining. But that stance is hard to maintain in this generation of parenting, when any mother or father who opts out of the PTO can find themselves ranked one baby step above child abuser. With some ambivalence, I served as room mother from my son Sam’s nursery school years through 5th grade, becoming the Mom who brought (but didn’t bake) the cookies, as well as the Mom who had a mental Rolodex on every kid in the class. Sam’s birthday parties never ventured into blockbuster territory—we didn’t have the money—but my husband John would dress up as a lion, or a dinosaur. Over time, my ambivalence faded away. By the end I was proud that I’d turned myself into the overly involved mom who’d joined Sam in the cafeteria every single Friday for six years.

So it took me some time to notice that Sam had gradually inherited my family’s aversion to celebration. I’d had some hints over the years, such as his fifth birthday party, when he went running for cover as Mad Scientist Beaker Baker asked him to serve as a human guinea pig. He made me promise never to give him a surprise birthday party after his 16th (“I liked it, I just don’t want to do it again”). Now it was the end of high school, and time for graduation. My idea was to throw a big party at our house with all of his friends, and, of course, all of mine. But Sam wanted to low key it. “It’s just graduation,” he grumbled. “What’s the big deal?”

What’s the big deal? After all, he was not only finishing high school, but was about to go to the college of his choice 2,000 miles away. In this time of extended adolescence, he was already on the verge of adulthood. Could this really be only a big deal to me? As my Greek chorus of mothers pointed out, the significance of this event for my life was pretty clear: Our work as parents—at least as the kind of parents who had much control over this child’s life—was done.

I tried to keep my anxiety in check but it wasn’t exactly working: I did manage to a) bend the muffler on my brother’s rental car when I pulled it out of our driveway, b) dent a car that was parked across the street and destroy my right rear bumper when I pulled my own car out of our driveway, and c) make a midnight visit to an emergency room the day before graduation because I had developed a curious case of pink eye. (“Isn’t that an illness common to small children?” someone asked me. “How’d you get it?”)

“Everyone loves graduation,” my normally taciturn husband, John, insisted, rubbing his palms together like a man ready for a sumptuous banquet. Unlike weddings or birthdays, he reasoned, there wasn’t a lot of family drama or aging anxiety. But that didn’t really win me over. What about this giant anxiety that our kid—our only son, who we’ve raised together for 18 years—was now leaving us forever?

I soothed myself the usual way by making lists. Which of my friends would Sam allow me to invite to the afterparty? How could I keep the adult drinks away from the teens and avoid any potential lawsuits? Could I re-upholster the family room sofa in time for my mother’s arrival? Re-landscape the front yard? I started cleaning with the help of our housekeeper Eva, who shrouded every trash can with a white plastic bag, after I’d refused her suggestion to spray paint the stained and blotched bottoms white. (“Why has Eva put condoms on all our trash cans?” John asked.) Because Sam thought the school’s graduation invitations were too boring—he’s been watching a lot of HGTV—we made our own with the help of the computer. It featured a photo of a smiling Sam at age 2 on the front, and a photo of him as a snarling teenager on the inside.

The truth is, it’s much easier to be a grownup for your child than your spouse, family, friends, or even yourself. If Sam didn’t want a frazzled and/or weeping mom on graduation day, he wasn’t going to get one. I did not restage the Battle of Gettysburg when, after helping out all morning on graduation day, he accidentally on purpose missed the family lunch, and then made himself scarce, carting his cap, gown, and one of his father’s best ties to his friend Jenny’s house before heading to the hall to be checked for alcohol or drugs.

We had a family dinner at our neighborhood Mexican restaurant, and then picked up Sam’s close friends Noni and Sara for the ride across town to the ceremony. I felt a pang when I saw them, two girls I’d known since kindergarten, now blonde stunners in sunglasses and Anthropologie sundresses. Their version of nostalgia was to fill us in on who had been busted for drugs during the school year, and how the daughter of a friend—“She’s SO heinous!”—had been arrested at Target for trying to shoplift 76 thongs. Maybe I wasn’t totally present: I kept trying to figure out how she’d filled her purse with 76 pairs of flipflops. (When I was a kid, that’s what a thong was.)

And then we were there, at a civic center glowing with import on the coastal plain at sunset. It looked like a cross between a small town community hospital and a contemporary art museum in the eastern bloc. We poured in with the other families—abuelitas from Mexico, solemn dads from Southeast Asia, African American parents from the southwest side of town with airhorns. John was right—everyone was happy, even as we, too, were wanded and searched, and found the only seats available in the last row.

Sitting with my parents, my husband, my brothers and their wives, I saw Sam’s first babysitter, Chanpheng, who had immigrated to Texas from Laos in 1975, file in with her family. I’d told her not to feel she had to come so far, but there she was, with her husband, grayer than I’d remembered, her beautiful daughters, and her son who had been Sam’s best childhood friend, now a college junior and as tall as a pro basketball player. At some point Eva filed in, too. To a one we were beaming and buoyed, an extended American family joined in our love for the child who had brought us all together.

By the time the procession began and my tall, handsome son passed by—ducking the camera and cracking jokes, of course—I felt no loss, only an overwhelming gratitude. “A baby belongs to the world,” my neighbor Karla said to me soon after Sam was born, and though she wasn’t offering advice, I took it as such. Sam had pulled me into a sprawling new life I could never have imagined, a deeper and richer one that would never have been possible without him. (“Were you thinking about your future?” I asked him later. “Hell no,” he said. “I just didn’t want to trip.”)

At the party afterward, I caught sight of Sam with his friends on the porch swing, where I had rocked him as a baby. He looked tired and even a little wistful, going back and forth, back and forth, using his heels to slow himself down.