Small Town News

Jill Pertler, "Slices of Life"

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Reflections on the last first-day photo

They all got off to school last week. It was my daughter's last first day. Senior year! The reality has descended like a cloud and I've been walking in a fog ever since Tuesday morning when they left to meet their teachers.

I had them stand in front of the evergreen shrubs in our back yard, just like I do every year, except this time will be the last. Next September there will be one less person in our family's first-day-of-school photo. She will be gone off to college, and there will only be brothers standing by the shrubs.

This year, though, for one last time, she stood and smiled for my camera. Through all these Septembers she's been a pretty good sport about it, standing by her little brothers and all. She's still taller than them, but that will soon change. I give it six months, a year at most.

The boys will grow and their senior years will be here in a blink of an eye. I see that now. Understand it. Know it firsthand. Time goes by so quickly. Enjoy each minute and every day; they will be over too soon.

People whose children have grown and gone tell you these things all the time, but you don't believe it. I'm not sure it's possible to believe it. Parenthood is so in the moment; it's hard to be anywhere else than that.

When she was born, it took more than eight hours of breathing through the pain to bring her into the world and less than one second for her to wrap herself around my heart. I turned a corner that day and my life changed in ways I never could have guessed or tried to comprehend. That seven-pound bundle of pink took my breath away.

It seems like just yesterday we loaded her on the kindergarten bus and then got in our minivan and raced to the school to get a photo of her getting off the bus. How silly we were back then. Our third child was an infant in a car seat at the time; my husband carried him. I carried the camera and held the hand of our toddler as we ran, huffing and puffing, to meet the bus.

That infant started at the middle school this week and is nearly able to open his locker without a hitch. The toddler, now 14, is at the high school with his sister. I do not feel a dozen years older.

I could still run to meet the kindergarten bus. At least I think I could. Maybe I could.

Senior year. It all comes back to that right now. Senior year and I am out of sorts because I never thought it would get here. How can 18 years have passed already? Where does time go? Like a bad cliche, it slips by - unforeseen and unexpected.

I remember when she stood in the kitchen, under the counter. Under. It didn't even touch her head because she wasn't tall enough. When she started to talk, I wrote down all the words she said. I stopped when her vocabulary got to 100 because that was a lot of words. She hated her car seat; sometimes I had to turn the radio up louder hoping she'd listen to the music and quit screaming. She called grapes "bidg-ees." When she heard a sound she couldn't identify, she'd say, "What's that beep, beep?" Her favorite color was "lellow." Still is.

Senior year. I can get through this. Many have done it before me. Just breathe.

My daughter stands in front of the shrubs on the first day of her last year of high school - still taking my breath away - and I know we are approaching another corner. Soon we will navigate the turn, and our lives will change in ways we can't yet comprehend. We are moving forward; and as difficult, stressful and exciting as that may be, it is the only direction we can go.

Jill Pertler is a syndicated columnist and award-winning freelance writer. She appreciates your comments and can be reached at <pertmn@qwest.net>, or you can check out her Web site at <http: ll marketing-by-design, home, mchsi. com/>.



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© 2009 Tri-County News Kimball, Minnesota. All Rights Reserved. This content, including derivations, may not be stored or distributed in any manner, disseminated, published, broadcast, rewritten or reproduced without express, written consent from DAS.

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