Wednesday June 19th, 2013 • 6:13:00am
Sitting in the big university's conference room, complete with its PowerPoint presentation, coffee, donuts and dozens of other teenagers and their parents, I couldn't help but flash back about 13 years ago.
It was a simpler time, but no less fraught with anxiety and uncertainty as to what the future holds for my child.
Those parent orientations for pre-K, kindergarten and first grade kind of blur together now. But I remember how important it was to me that they know my child, that they know what I know ... just how precious and special she is.
Now it is up to her to get that point across. This time, she will certainly be a smaller fish in a bigger pond. She will make her way in an incoming class of thousands, a cog in a very big wheel that nonetheless offers abundant opportunities for exciting growth.
Thirteen-some-odd years ago, at those orientations, there was talk of my child's safety. Class schedules, lunch fare, where and when they nap, various costs that will be incurred. Extra activities they can participate in if they choose to.
I had to smile at the parallel. The college entry process is packed with information on curriculum plans, campus safety, meal plans, where they will stay and, of course, cost. The orientation facilitators bubble over about all the choices my student will have inside the classroom and outside the classroom.
The only big difference between then and now is that student 13 years ago had a shy, snaggle-tooth smile, pigtails and a Barbie backpack. This year she drives her own car, her teeth are perfect, she is not shy, her hair is long, beautiful, either curly or straight depending on the mood, and the backpack is Vera Bradley and cost a whole lot more than the Barbie backpack I got at Walmart.
Oh, and this time around she is moving out of the house. But we are not ready to speak of that yet.
There is one more big difference. This time, administrators, counselors and the like are not talking to me. I am merely an accessory with a checkbook. All questions are directed toward the student, who is 18 and legal in most states, able to make her own decisions and put her own sentences together.
It is not hard for me to keep my mouth shut; just different, that's all. I want the girl to do what she wants and it needs to be her choices, not mine. However, I have hinted that I might be inclined to take some college courses and she should not be surprised at all if she runs into me at Starbucks on a given day, but I'm really just kidding. No, I'm not. Yes, I am.
It is pretty exciting and mind-boggling at the same time. My brain is excited and happy for her, but my hands and feet are numb with anxiety. Any waking up in the middle of the night pretty much guarantees and hour or more of tossing and turning, with my mind going to the dark places it has no business going to. My youngest tells me I am talking just a little too loud, and I cry when the wrong commercials are on TV.
But I'm fine. Really.
So this year I won't be standing outside that classroom, encouraging one more smile for the camera, waving to the teacher who knows my first name and waiting for her to come out at the end of the day.
Or will I?
After resisting for more than two years hawkish political pressures to intervene militarily in Syria's bitter civil war, the Obama administration apparently has decided that now's the time.
On Friday, news agencies reported that the U.S. will begin supplying small arms and ammunition to the Syrian opposition. When, how much, and precisely to whom remain at this point unspecified.
If the reports are true, we're about to undertake a new military commitment in a very murky conflict, a commitment strongly opposed by most Americans. Even those urging it most stridently can't even begin to predict the consequences. It's worth asking, why now?
The nominal answer, according to the reports, is that the White House has concluded that the Syrian government has indeed used chemical weapons "on a small scale," thus breaching the no-chemicals "red line" declared by President Obama last August.
The evidence underwriting that conclusion is equivocal at best, based almost entirely on opposition claims and medical examinations of alleged victims. Even then, U.S. intelligence sources count fewer than 200 possible chemical casualties - this, from what would be a strategically moronic exercise for which no one, including the opposition itself, has been able to suggest a militarily defensible purpose.
Instead, the real incentive for the administration to intervene now probably reflects other much less humanitarian pressures. Perhaps the most immediate are concerns that the military momentum has begun to shift in the Syrian government's favor.
During the past few weeks, reinforced by fighters from Lebanon's Hezbollah, government forces have recaptured the town of Qusair near the Lebanese border, begun clearing the provinces of Homs and Hama, and now threaten Aleppo, Syria's largest city and the rebellion's psychological center of gravity.
In a briefing Monday for foreign journalists, Israel's minister for international affairs, strategy, and intelligence bluntly conceded that Assad "might not just survive but even regain territories" from the rebels. Although his remarks were publicly disavowed by other Israeli officials, many quietly agree.
Still another pressure on the White House is new criticism from nominal presidential allies. Joining Sen. John McCain, by far most vocal promoter of U.S. military intervention, at a "closed to the press" event Tuesday that leaked almost immediately, former President Bill Clinton suggested that Mr. Obama would be "a total fool" to allow public opinion to deter him from intervening on behalf of the rebels.
If he refused to act because "there was a poll in the morning paper that said 80 percent of [Americans] were against it," he reportedly declared, "[he'd] look like a total wuss" - this, from the fellow who, when he was on the hot seat, allegedly consulted public opinion polls before deciding what to eat for breakfast.
Finally, some Middle East allies - especially Sunni Arab states such as Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates that support the largely Sunni opposition - complain that American failure to intervene in support of the rebels risks conceding dominant regional influence to Russia and Shi'ite Iran, Assad's strongest supporters.
Indeed, unsurprisingly, the Russian reaction to Thursday's announcement was prompt and explicit. Warned Yuri Ushakov, Russian President Vladimir Putin's chief foreign policy adviser, U.S. military aid to the rebels would only make it more difficult to reach the durable political settlement to which the U.S. claims to be committed.
The real question, of course, is what comes next. As a practical matter, handing the rebels small arms won't materially improve their military prospects. That would require endowing them with the very sort of weapons - surface-to-air missiles, for example - that we (and the Israelis) least desire to see ending up in the hands of potentially hostile Islamists.
Still less attractive - even, according to some recent reports, to U.S. allies Britain and France, who have urged giving arms to the opposition - are the sorts of direct military action that McCain and his acolytes continue to demand: destruction of Syria's air force, establishment of a no-fly-zone and safe bases for rebel forces in Syria, and air strikes against Assad's chemical stocks, assuming that they could reliably be located and targeted in the first place.
In short, the net effect of Thursday's decision, if indeed one has been made, will be to invest U.S. resources and reputation in an increasingly sectarian contest for purposes that are totally unclear, while exerting virtually no effective influence on its outcome.
There scarcely could be a better definition of strategic fecklessness. Unless, of course, our real agenda is simply to keep the Syrian pot boiling, in the belief that miring Russia, Iran, and even Hezbollah in a proxy war in Syria beats freeing them to engage in even more troublesome adventures elsewhere.
In which case our claim to be motivated solely by humanitarian concern, far from proving us feckless, instead merely would prove us hypocritical. It certainly wouldn't be the first time.
It's hard for people on the outside of the pageant bubble to relate to what is happening when you go to Tulsa for the Miss Oklahoma and Miss Oklahoma's Outstanding Teen pageant. Even my closest family and friends have trouble grasping the method and order of events. It is just a world of its own and you are either into it or you aren't.
The week is long for the girls who compete, but hopefully, if Mom is organized and prepared, there is down time for her. By the time you get to that point, it is really all up to the girl and the support team should get a break.
However, every year there is a thing or two to hunt down, one last little detail to cross off the list. Over the years I have assisted in wardrobe emergencies that prompted outings for the likes of red earrings, espadrilles, boots, sparkly hair bands, talent earrings, an extra dress just in case, spanx, and that random gift or two for yet another person who is helping your daughter.
While I am reasonably organized and enjoy the process, I am not a very good Pageant Mom. Compared to many of them, I am the Lucy Ricardo to the other Angelina Jolies. I left Tulsa this year with a rather nasty coffee burn on my stomach due to a coffee maker explosion that in all actuality should garner me a large cash settlement, and a hideously purple middle toe from an episode I don't recall.
I'm pretty sure those other moms were eating bonbons and getting pedicures while I was tearing up the room trying to find my car keys for the third time. In my seat at the pageant, I lost my phone no less than a dozen times while they were schmoozing gracefully with pageant royalty.
The week includes seven pageants four Miss and three Teen pageants and is not for the faint of heart. It is a girly-girls' paradise, eight to 10 days complete with makeup, hair spray, hot rollers, hair straighteners, enough clothes to fill a small boutique, high heels, jewelry, fun and food.
By the end of the week there were four of us in one room, an adventure that's best to avoid if possible. While it was actually a ton of fun, the outsider might not appreciate the narrow path leading from the door to the bathroom, then to the desk, the rest of the room strewn with all kinds of mentionables and unmentionables. It got especially ugly after the clothes rack collapsed, a casualty of too many years, too much weight and a lost screw or two.
I learned that after 1 a.m. three teenage girls get really giddy and fun, though perhaps a bit gassy, to put it nicely, and my deepest apologies go to our neighbors on both sides. Three nights of staying up till after 2 o'clock have ruined me for the summer, as my reality does not support the 2 a.m.-to-10 a.m. sleeping schedule, which I discovered this morning.
A bonus is the pageant royalty who serve as role models for our daughters, sharing time and space with them, women like Lauren Nelson and many other former Miss Oklahomans and Teens, who get to know your daughters' names and are lovely examples for them to look up to.
So it is a lot of work getting there, a huge buildup that is over in a flash, and then you come home to a mess. The reprieve is simply a breather that gives the pageant girl time to regroup, because the whole process begins again in a few short weeks, as the 2014 pageant season starts with local pageants across the state just as soon as the 2013 finals are over.
It is on to the next one.
By now, it should be apparent to regular readers of editorial page commentary that what fuels most op-eds - not excluding this one - is righteous indignation. Whatever writers' political, ideological, or policy prejudices, all of us spend a good deal of time wringing our rhetorical hands.
Usually, there's a defensible policy excuse for that indignation, at least among those of like mind. And since a good deal of research confirms that folks read, watch, and listen only to commentators with whom they agree and avoid those with whom they don't, that usually suffices.
Sometimes, though, pundits' high dudgeon rings hollow, even among those who otherwise might share it. This week's revelation that the National Security Agency collects and tracks Americans' telephone and internet communications qualifies as one of those "oh dear, oh dear" non-events.
According to Britain's Guardian newspaper, which broke the story on Wednesday, a classified order of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court - FISA in the jargon - allows NSA to collect records of all Verizon phone calls made by or to American citizens. Although the actual order leaked to the Guardian applies only to Verizon, other carriers presumably are obeying similar directives.
Not to be outdone, on Thursday the Washington Post revealed that a classified program called PRISM similarly permits NSA to collect massive quantities of internet data. As with the telephone collection effort, this authority doesn't extend to the content of internet communications, but does permit NSA to track senders and addressees.
Both efforts were launched after 9-11-01 by the Bush administration pursuant to the Patriot Act and have continued into the Obama administration. Nevertheless, their revelation this week has ignited a firestorm of critical commentary bemoaning government overreach and its presumed assault on liberty, privacy, and the American Way of Life.
Those doing the bemoaning, however, tend to skate right past the inconvenient reality that both programs were sanctioned by Congress and operate under rigorous congressional and judicial scrutiny. As one defender of the programs notes sardonically, "the scandal here isn't what has been done illegally - it's what has been done legally."
Actually, that tongue-in-cheek comment could be stretched to cover most of what we've done to ourselves under the banner of the Global War On Terror, and if we don't like it, we have no one but ourselves to blame. It's hard to exaggerate the price we've paid as a society for the policies adopted in the wake of 9-11.
Those policies reflected a perfect political storm: shock that we in the U.S weren't immune from the extremist violence occurring elsewhere in the world, its perpetrators' claim to vindication by a faith that - let's admit it - many Americans find repugnant, the desire of a new president chosen in a bitterly contested and controversial election to validate his leadership, and both political and media hype of a highly visual tragedy.
Together, those pressures produced what even some supporters of the GWOT now recognize to have been an extreme and ill-considered over-reaction, the price of which, whether measured in lives, money, or civil liberties, has hugely exceeded the direct damage done to us by bin Laden and his acolytes.
That FISA has permitted NSA on the flimsiest of probable cause to collect massive amounts of data on Americans' electronic communications is perhaps the least tendentious item on that self-inflicted bill, and the indignation that it has aroused accordingly is utterly unconvincing.
One certainly has leave to wonder whether the programs in question have produced or are likely to produce results worth their cost. In the old computer phrase, Garbage In, Garbage Out. But among the charges for loss, pain, and inconvenience that we've inflicted on ourselves since 9-11 in the name of an unattainable perfect security, NSA's collection programs appear well down on the invoice.
Apart from the lost lives and shattered bodies of too many of our military personnel, the real damage has been to our understanding of what it means to live in a free society governed by a Constitution and laws. Some day, when historians look back on this period with the dispassion of time, they'll wonder how a presumably practical people managed to succumb so readily to what amounted to a mass pyschosis.
And continue to do so. Notes the same defender of the Patriot Act quoted earlier, "Those who want to push the government back into the standard law enforcement approachÖwill have to explain how it will allow us to catch terrorists who use halfway decent tradecraft - or why sticking with that model is so fundamentally important that we should do so even if it means more acts of terrorism at home."
On that reasoning, what price indignation? If any price is worth paying to prevent another 9-11, up to and including dismantling the Bill of Rights, let's not pretend to be offended by the result.
When it comes to technology, I am never the first to get anything. You'll always know when a new version of something is coming out, because that is exactly when I break down and buy the version that has one foot out the door.
Like the iPhone. I bought the 4G the week before the 5G came out, which instantly made me not cool, despite the fact that I believed I was. Come on. If the old iPhone was so terrible, why did they think it was OK to charge $400 for it? And guess what? That phone I paid all that money for still drops calls when I make a right on Lee Boulevard.
Anyway, that leads me to the e-reader conundrum. I am one of those people holding out against e-readers because I like to physically hold on to a book made of real paper.
Sure, I know it's greener to read on a reader. My 81-year-old Mother has a reader and if you ask her, she will tell you it's the greatest thing since sliced bread, and we all know how great sliced bread is. But for me, there is something that stirs inside me as I hold a book, smell the paper, bend the pages, get them wet by the pool and stack them at my bedside.
I feel the same about the newspaper issue. I have read a daily, local newspaper since I was a little girl, off and on. It started with the comics, then on to Dear Abby, the horoscope, the society/styles section, then, finally, the front page, local and business sections. In my 20s I decided I needed to be smarter and subscribed to The Wall Street Journal, which made for a great liner for the cat box. But I definitely felt smarter.
Then, eight years ago, somebody screwed up at this publication and let me have a weekly column, so now I am officially in the newspaper business. OK, maybe unofficially, but I love being a part of an industry that plays such an important role in people's life, and in history.
It has been said that no one under the age of 30 reads a paper anymore, and that is a crying shame. Parents should encourage their children to at least scan the headlines, as they should also do.
Because what happens when you just get your news online? For one thing, you miss the local angle. You don't learn which council member is fighting with whom, and why, and you don't learn the important issues that are impacting your own community. (The council fighting is just the fun stuff.)
Online you will surely get "pop" news, a phrase I don't much care for, and you get the condensed version of what someone thinks is trendy and popular. Online news is not a bad tool for hard news, but your local newspaper is part of the glue that holds a community together.
And without our local support, in advertising and readership, we will lose those little pearls of local politics, entertainment, updates on friends and family, local sports pictures and updates that that The Associated Press knows nothing about.
If you're reading this, I know I'm preaching to the choir. But thanks, anyway, for reading.
Honestly, y'all know I like to brag about being from Texas.
Some of the time I do it just to irritate my readers, because the rivalry is pretty fierce. But the fact is that I've lived here in Oklahoma for 21 years, and right now I'm going to brag on Oklahomans.
I've heard the phrase "Oklahoma Standard" before, but never really given it much thought. Right now I see it as second nature for this group of Oklahomans who know hard times and how to deal with them.
Stories are floating around about the surge of people who have stepped up to help those victims of the May 20 Moore tornado, as well as the tornadoes that hit several other communities the day before. I have heard that from early on they had to turn away volunteers. I am also hearing stories from friends and acquaintances who are up there getting their hands dirty and working the cleanup alongside citizens from all over, including many from out of state. Oklahoma is clearly a community of people who care about each other.
The heartbreaking situation with the kids in the schools has prompted a lot of talk over the best way to protect our schoolchildren in the future. I've seen posts about how we need a safe room or shelter in every school, which is of course a great idea, but the question of how to pay for it is a big one.
Also, it has been suggested that we call off school entirely when there is a strong threat of tornadoes. In that case, should there be a tornado there could still be the problem of kids home alone during a tornado or caught outside in bad weather.
I remember when my kids were in elementary school and the sirens went off, I would go and pick them up, with mild protests from administrators, who believed they were safer at school. I have no doubt that officials in Moore had the childrens' safety first and foremost in their mind, but this EF5 Perfect Storm was ferocious and hit head-on. Still, the question of how to best handle a scenario like this one prompts much discussion.
I would also like to address the media coverage during the aftermath. While I am thankful that the meteorologists were on top of things, as I believe they were, the throng of reporters who stood there and filled air time for hours afterward were, at the very least, annoying at times.
In an example of the difference between reporting and speculating, I heard on a live coverage spot where one reporter asked another what he knew about reports of children drowning in the basement of the school. The second reporter did not know a thing about it, yet spoke at length about the possibility of such an instance. The story of the drownings was a rumor that has since been declared to be false, and we did not need to paint a dreadful picture of something that was not true just for ratings' sake.
Reporting should be based on fact, not opinion. For the record, this is an opinion column above all else, and I do not claim to be reporting facts, merely things as I see them.
Finally, starting Wednesday, we are doing a donation drive at Salas Mexican Restaurant and working in conjunction with the Salvation Army for help with items such as household goods, toiletry items, diapers, bottled water, and/or cash. I know there are people in this community who want to help, and this is one way that you can.
That Oklahoma Standard, and the people of Oklahoma, are hard at work and showing the rest of this nation what we are made of. I may be from Texas, but I am proud to say that I live in Oklahoma.
For a year and a half, I have heard warnings of how busy the senior year is. For the parent, I mean. What they didn't tell me was that all that busyness was going to take place the last week of school.
Ever since I figured it out, I have complained every year about how every single kid activity culminates in the month of May. December is a close second. But for the senior and parent, this last week of school is like May on steroids, with an attitude, and the Roid-Rage is definitely a-ragin'.
There is the issue of out-of-town guests. Family and friends start to make the trek to Oklahoma, which means that we need to clean up our act a little bit. Now, normally, the very best way to get my house in order is to have my parents come visit. Stacks and clusters that have been there for months magically disperse and find their home when they really need to.
Not so this time. And I can blame it all on one thing.
The Scrapbook Project.
It is a tradition at our school for most seniors to have to do a 15-page scrapbook for their English class. They know it going into their senior year; that it is due on Monday the last week of school. What I didn't know is that apparently it is also a tradition for the seniors to underestimate and procrastinate this project, and not tackle it until the night before, thus resulting in an all-nighter for the student, and in some cases, for the parent as well.
At my house there were two seniors working on the project, which means double the fun and double the mess. They not only trashed my house the day my parents rolled into town, but they also were up most of the night, leaving me going into this busy week with a raw edginess that probably is not going to serve me well.
This is one of those fond memories that will be SO much more fun as time goes by. Right now it leaves a parent slightly concerned about that kid that's going off to college to seek their fortune and have to manage their own time and schedule.
Not to mention there is the stress that those of us with other kids and a full-time job are feeling, because life goes on and the usual demands don't go away just because it is graduation week. Murphy is at work here, and things are going wrong at exactly the same time that my house is not getting cleaned for company.
Still, it is best to be mindful of the big picture, not sweat the small stuff, and try, at least, to savor these moments. The good ones, anyway.
Special prayers go out this week to the families of all the graduating class of 2013 and that special group of kids. Even though they are mighty procrastinators, we still love 'em.
A whole bunch.
Well, now we know. The Global War On Terror - GWOT, in the jargon - which we once thought deliberately excised from the Pentagon's vocabulary, on the contrary is alive and well. Moreover, according to senior Pentagon officials, we should expect it to continue for years to come.
At a hearing Thursday before the Senate Armed Services Committee concerning possible changes to the Authorization for the Use of Military Force, the nominal legal authority for all U.S. overseas combat operations since 9-11-01, Assistant Defense Secretary Michael Sheehan insisted that such operations would be necessary for "at least" another 10 to 20 years, and might be mounted anywhere in the world "from Boston to the FATA" - Pakistan's tribal areas - without further Congressional authorization.
That assertion prompted one senator to declare Thursday's hearing "the most astoundingly disturbing hearing that I've been to since I've been here." "You guys," he complained, referring to the Pentagon, "have essentially rewritten the Constitution here today."
Rammed through Congress in the panicky days after 9-11, the AUMF authorized President Bush to use whatever force he considered necessary against those who "planned, authorized, committed or aided" the 9-11 attacks or "harbored such organizations or persons."
The AUMF's principal target, of course, was Afghanistan, whose Taliban rulers refused demands to surrender Osama bin Laden and his henchmen to justice. In that respect only, the AUMF amounted to a declaration of war, although we'd have been better off in many ways had the Bush administration asked for, and Congress declared, just such a formal state of war.
Of course, no one at the time contemplated that the AUMF would later help to justify invading Iraq, still less to conduct a global campaign of assassination-by-drone against anyone even remotely associated with groups hostile to the U.S., not excluding American citizens such as Anwar al-Awlaki and his teen-age son, killed by a CIA drone in Yemen two years ago.
The sheer light-heartedness with which Sheehan described the Pentagon's view of its reach under the AUMF disturbed some senators. Asked if any terrorist group affiliated however loosely with Al Qaeda automatically constituted a threat to the U.S., Sheehan replied, "Yes, sir, although it's a bit murky."
A bit murky. And for the next 10 to 20 years, according to Sheehan, that "murkiness" will suffice to justify U.S. military action anywhere in the world, without any further legal sanction, and at whatever cost to America's reputation as a nation of laws.
No wonder even hawkish senators such as Arizona's John McCain were disturbed. For McCain, of course, the appropriate answer is to reissue the AUMF in expanded form intended explicitly to permit if not encourage outright future U.S. military intervention in situations such as Syria that are only remotely related to the GWOT.
Others worry about the opposite problem. What would happen, one senator asked Sheehan curiously, were the Afghan government to make peace with the Taliban's Mullah Omar - he, of course, being the fellow who, by refusing to hand over Bin Laden, justified the invasion of Afghanistan in the first place.
Would we continue under the AUMF to be at war with Omar, hence the Taliban, even though Afghanistan itself no longer was? To which Sheehan replied, "That could be the case, yes." The exchange probably would have made perfect senseÖto Alice in Wonderland's Red Queen.
But the real problem with Sheehan's testimony, and his open-ended view of both the AUMF and the GWOT he claims that it authorizes, is how in the world we'll know when they end. Asked at the same hearing, "Does the AUMF expire by presidential declaration, congressional action or the occurrence of an actual event in the world," acting DoD General Counsel Robert Taylor replied, "Precisely how that would be written and established is unclear."
The irony of the AUMF, passed at a time of rare political unity, is that, in today's poisonous climate, the same congressional gridlock that prevents the president from achieving anything useful domestically also frees him effectively to do whatever he chooses militarily.
So the GWOT will continue apace, even though no one seems able to define precisely who our enemies are or how we expect to defeat them. Instead, the Pentagon apparently is quite comfortable prosecuting a "murky" war for decades to come, with no further congressional approval of its activities required or desired, and above all, with no clear idea of how they or we will know when it ends.
For those historically inclined, it's hard not to wonder whether we've regressed to the 17th century and the 30 Years' War pitting Protestants against Catholics, and that ended by killing millions and devastating large swathes of Europe.
But at least that war produced the Peace of Westphalia, which established the modern state system and the foundations of international law - the very foundations, it should be noted, that we now seem to be bound and determined to undermine.
A lot of people who know my oldest daughter will be graduating from high school next week have asked me how I'm doing. They tend to approach me gently, sympathetically, as though I were a wounded animal, or someone who has just been diagnosed with a terminal disease.
Which is OK, because sometimes that's how I feel.
The short answer is I'm doing fine, thank you for asking. But the long answer is much more complex. Right now all the year-end activities have me moving so fast I don't know which end is up, so there is a great deal of diversion in the day.
But in those rare moments when things settle down, the room is quiet and actual conversation takes place, or that rarest of gems, solitary reflection actually occurs, there is a glimmer of the unknown that could cause me to puddle up.
For the most part, she is so excited that I am simply excited for her. Life really is a process that prepares us one step at a time. None of us should be blindsided to know that our child will graduate from high school then go off to college. We have prepared for this all our lives and it is truly a joy and a blessing.
Plus, by May, the senior is typically ready to run, not walk, away from high school. They are DONE with the juvenile treatment that is part of the public classroom makeup, drama with friends whom they have grown up with, test prep, testing, homework, busy work, the list goes on: they a They are JUST DONE.
Then there is the "I'm 18" factor. They are also feeling DONE with curfews and being told what to do by their parents. The latitude that is given them varies from house to house, but for the most part it is never enough. The truth is they cannot wait to get out from under our wings, and do God only knows what, and that is both a joy and a concern for the parent.
So having said all that, there is no denying I am close to the edge. I have to be careful about what I watch on TV, because even the endangered tiger commercial can start a crying jag that is difficult to stop. If you cut me off in traffic I can't be responsible for what I might do, and if they are once again out of redskin peanuts at The Superstore, just go ahead and call 911.
Yesterday my daughter was chattering about her day and mentioned in passing that she went to the college-age class at Sunday school. She had moved on to another topic, then another and another, before I finally had allowed what she said to sink in and was able to speak about it. "You went to the college class?" I asked, with a slight tremor in my voice.
The warning bell didn't register right away in her head, and she just said yeah, she did, and she moved on, but I wasn't done. I had to ask the question a time or two more, and I could feel something buried deep down inside me that wanted to come out, but I haven't been letting it.
It's called raw emotion. Finally, my girl clued in that I could lose it, if I let myself, and we went out for ice cream, instead.
So it's like that.
I am hanging on by a thread. And it's all good. And yes, ice cream helps. Thanks again for asking.
Everyone always wisecracks about how there is no owner's manual for child rearing. That is both true and false. There are a gazillion books out there; you just have to know which one to read. Frankly, I believe the Bible is the best guide book for parents when it comes to raising their kids.
But allow me to clue you in to one of the most important things parents need to know about getting through the Senior Year.
Organize your pictures early and often.
Yes, that's it. There is no big secret, no huge revelation about anything other than the fact that if you don't heed what I say you will be like some of us out there reduced to a frazzle before spring break that will only grow into a wailing hissy fit by the first of May.
It starts right after the first of the year. The Senior Yearbook Ad. OCD Helicopter Parents already feeling the angst of losing their child to graduation and college struggle over what words can be written to express 18 years worth of love in a half or full page yearbook ad. What pictures best portray the life of the beloved child?
Patient yearbook teachers who surely go through this every year walk and sometimes carry us through the process. For many of us it is our first time to begin to say goodbye to the child who is turning into that ever- so-foreign concept; an adult who is about to set the world on fire. For the yearbook teacher we are merely another anxious parent who is eaten up with too much caffeine and too many emotions to be rational and just needs to submit some dang pictures and be done with it.
Then a multitude of entities begin to ask for pictures for various slide shows and farewells. The baby picture becomes a high priority, and despite the fact that those kids are the cutest thing ever, our teenagers do not appreciate the wild hair, mismatched clothes, funny poses and sweet baby butts like we do.
The church might ask that a table for the child be set up for Senior Sunday ... a neat concept, but something that quickly and clearly evolves into a shrine-like ritual that, if you're not prepared for, could possibly kick you in your proverbial butt.
A new trend is to design your own graduation announcements because we all know what great designers we really are with a montage of photos that accurately depicts the personality of the graduate.
That was eight hours of my life I'll never get back, and still more gray hairs I'll never get rid of.
The whole process is ongoing, and I'm sure that there are other things I should be doing that I don't know about, but there is my secret tip to getting through the Senior Year. The digital photo is a wonderful thing, but if you're like me and many of the photos reside in your computer in a disarray of albums that have no rhyme or reason, you had best up your game and get yourself organized.
And while scanning hard copy photos shouldn't be rocket science, it really is.
Since I have two children, hopefully the next high school graduation I face will be a smoother process because by then I'll know what I'm doing.
Actually, that hasn't always worked out like it should. But one can always hope.
68°F
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Humidity: 94%
Wind: 3 mph
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