Our Time Warp and Wormhole Graduation Season

High school grads playing kickball on their childhood school field.

time warp: [noun] an anomaly, discontinuity, or suspension held to occur in the progress of time.

wormhole: [noun] A theoretical tunnel between two distant points in our universe that cuts the travel time from one point to another. See space-time continuum.

Both our daughters have graduated high school, and we now have a strange spring graduation season. We've been invited to the graduation parties of neighbors, friends, the younger siblings of friends of our children, and all of this seems like a distant memory. Not only a distant memory, but also a far-away memory.

We no longer live in the neighborhood where these parties are being held. Driving down those streets brings back all the wonderful memories of playing in the park with our then-toddlers, visiting with neighbors between yards, walking to restaurants with the family for a meal. And as much as I've stayed connected to friends and neighbors in Minneapolis, I don't return to the area too often, and it feels like a completely different world altogether. 

The graduation parties are mostly for kids graduating from Southwest High School, the school my children would have gone to had there not been mental health issues, neurodivergency, and a pandemic involved. My children stopped being these kids' classmates after 8th grade. Looking through each graduate's photo displays was a strange experience. I recognized the graduate, I recognized many of their classmates, but my children were never their classmates at this stage in life. My own kids are now 18 and 21, yet I still picture their classmates as the 1st and 2nd graders that I knew them as most. 

Paula, the parent of one of the graduates, and I.

How I remember her daughter (Sophia, far left, Lindsey and Marissa)

I recognized and re-connected with so many parents of kids, some of whom lived just a street or two away from us, but our kids were never friends. Most surreal was visiting with 3rd grade teacher for both our daughters. She is a lovely and kind person, and had such an incredible influence on both our girls. She has one more year of teaching ahead of her and then she is retiring. She said how wonderful it was to be invited to the graduation parties of the children she taught years before. If I thought I was living in a time warp, I'm sure she feels that a hundredfold. 

Miss O'Hara and I

The last grad party we went to was across the street from the lower grade school that our girls attended through 3rd grade. As the evening wore on, the new grads organized a game of kickball on the school field, the girls were in their party dresses, the boys in their good pants or dress shorts. And as I watched them play, I imagined them as little 5-year-old kindergarteners on that same field, learning the rules of of the game they so easily played now.

Maybe it's because I moved around a lot as a child, but the idea of playing on my elementary schoolyard field as an adult is an utterly foreign concept. 

That evening, driving the 40 minutes to our new home in the country, I reflected on the changes in our lives. Our children are now out of high school, one nearly done with college. We live in a completely different area, surrounded by trees and open sky. Back through the wormhole to our new little corner of the world. 

It's My Favorite Day Today

I absolutely adore our life with our young adult daughters. Okay, one is still a teen at 18, the other just turned 21. 

I am so goddamn proud of the people they have become. We have long, insightful discussions, about whatever is topmost on our minds. We talk politics, the world at large, the difficult of working with others, and silliness.

Today my youngest had a crappy day at work. But because it's my birthday, she said she doesn't want to burden me with it, she'll vent some other time. She works at a doggy daycare where she's been employed going on 3 years now.

"Was it the people or the dogs?" I asked.

"The people," she replied. 

"Yeah, people can suck," I say. "Dogs rarely do." And that's all she needs for now to know I understand.

Our family has millions of inside jokes. If you are a fan of National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation and can recite the entire movie verbatim, then you will catch on quickly! Even today, Wayne asked Lindsey to get me something "real nice" for my birthday. Just look up Cousin Eddie and "really nice" on YouTube and you'll come across the scene. (And yes, we adapted it.) Throughout all 12 months of the year we reference Grace, who died 30 years ago, or being so surprised you could sew our heads to the carpet. 

Marissa informed us when she was in high school that we were the only family she knew who sat down and ate dinner together. None of her other friends' families did that. She would go to a friends' house for a sleepover and everybody ate what they could find when they got to the kitchen. She reported this to us as a source of pride, that our family was so close and so fun to dine with. Her friends who came to our home for dinner report the same, and that makes me happy.

So anyway, it's my 53rd birthday and I am so incredibly, incredibly fortunate in this world. I have a family I love, both the one I live with and the ones I tease long distance, a home that is a dream to come home to, a job I love, and the most incredible supportive, funny, and wonderful friends a person could ask for. I couldn't ask for anything more in life. 

A Value to Silence

My dad in 2015, ready to "coffee" in his pajamas.

I am turning into my dad.

I have had a week of chronic insomnia. I don't have issues getting to sleep, I have issues staying asleep. I'll often wake around 1 or 2 am and be awake for 3 hours or so, falling back asleep an hour before I have to get up.

Each night I go to bed hopeful that I am so incredibly exhausted that I will sleep through my witching hour. But this week my brain has made it difficult to fall asleep and woke me back up around 1:00, no matter that I only finally fell asleep at 11. 

My dad was a chronic insomniac as well. Except it seems to me that he embraced it as a part of his life. He was a manager at J.I. Case in Racine, WI, in the 1970s, and they had a lot of issues with downtime on the lines that he'd been charged with solving. Later in life, when I was a working adult and we would spend time together, he told me that he did his best thinking in the middle of the night. He would turn the problem over in his head, look at it from all angles, and would often come to what was the best solution. Sometimes he was so motivated by what he'd just solved that he would go to work shortly after, so he could set the idea into motion. That meant that he sometimes arrived at work at 3 or 4 am, long before the day shift had started their work. This gave him respect in the eyes of the line workers, as he was the only "suit" who ever beat them to work. Those were the same days when he would arrive back home at 2, a little before the day shift finished their day, so it was a treat for us that dad was home early. All I knew as a child was that dad was home early, I didn't know he's already put in a nearly 12-hour day. 

Later in his life, when he was retired and living in the log cabin in Arkansas, his days and nights were his own. And yet, somehow, he often woke in the middle of the night. His brain, like mine, if not given a problem to solve at that hour, will create a problem out of something that isn't to give you something to think about. When I was pregnant with our first-born, her entire nursery design, colors, furniture, patterns, got planned between 1:00 and 3:00 in the morning. Designing and painting a nursery is obviously not an urgent "problem," but that's when my brain decided it should be thought about.

One day he and I were talking on the phone and he was telling me that he and his wife Terry had woken up early in the morning. They were both just lying awake in bed, so they chatted for a while, then decided to get up. They put a pot of coffee on, he made some Southern sausage with eggs, they had breakfast and talked about the day ahead. And then they went back to bed and decided to start the day later.

I asked him, "Wait, what time did you go back to bed?"

"Oh, it was probably around 6:00," he replied.

"So what time did you get up?" I asked.

"I think it was about 3," he said.

I remember laughing at the time. "Dad, 3:00 isn't the morning, it's the middle of the night!" His attitude was that morning was whenever you decided it would be.

And so here I am, at 4:30 in the morning, sitting in my living room, writing this post, having finished my first cup of coffee. The blinds on the windows are open as we have a snowstorm starting, and if it were light out I would be able to see it coming down. My dad would have loved our new home, our location with woods and fields, and wildlife all around. Unlike his extroverted daughter, he did not shy away from silence. He could sit in his darkened living room, a cup of coffee in hand, say nothing and take in the stillness. 

For the first time this week, I slept through my witching hour and managed to get more than 4 hours of sleep in a row. I woke up unreasonably early, at an hour when I typically would have said "it's the middle of the night." And even though I still only got 5 hours of sleep, they were consecutive. Wow! I am refreshed.

And so here I sit in a darkened living room, a fireplace flickering away, cup of coffee beside me, while the rest of the house sleeps.

Good morning, Dad.