Reason number 7 for not crying during your daughter's senior year of high school is sleeping teenagers. Teenagers love to sleep. They are seriously Olympic athletes at sleeping. They can sleep for hours. For days. To cry over the presence of sleeping teenagers would be absurd. And time consuming.
This is a photo I had my daughter snap (when she rolled over and opened her eyes briefly) while we were driving to a volleyball tournament a few weekends ago. I had obviously not awoken her by stroking her sweet, sleepy cheek and not tearing up about her belovedness.
II asked her to take the picture because I was also, obviously, not crying over the darling, innocent faces of her sleeping friends.
The blondie with her head down on the right has been Grace's best friend since kindergarten. She was the fourth child we invited over to our house that tough year, when my quiet girl was struggling to make friends and I was desperate to help. She was the only child in that string of playdates around whom Gracie acted like herself. With all the others she vigorously played the part of someone else and it hurt my heart to watch. With this one, though, she was her own silly, imaginative, quietly adventurous self. Today, Grace is the most herself running out for Chinese food or midnight milkshakes, or snuggling in for a movie night, or trying on prom dresses with this girl. This girl is grown and beautiful, now, just like my daughter. Not crying. I'm not crying over the mornings I awoke to hear them giggling over cartoons or the more recent late nights when I wake to hear them giggling over Snapchat.
The other two girls she met in high school, and they've grown quite dear to me as well. These are her teammates and classmates and touchstones, and I love them for her sake and for their own. No one told me how much one falls in love with the friends of your children. How you watch them grow and mature and spread their wings over time. No one told me it would hurt to think of losing them to college and the future, too, just as you're contemplating sending your own child off into the great unknown alone. You're losing them, too, and are significantly less likely to see much of them as the future unfolds. This fact doesn't, for example, make one cry.
I'm also not crying over my younger daughters, snuggled together in the corner of the back seat. I'm not crying over the speed with which it will be them heading off to these varsity tournaments and then into their own lives. I'm not crying that they gave up their entire Saturday to spend with the big sister who will barely acknowledge them all day because they, too, sense that our time with their beloved big sister under our roof is getting short. It doesn't make one cry. It's just sleeping teenagers. They're always sleeping.
I'm not crying. You're crying.
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