Those Great Expectations...

A friend sent me the photo below from her daughter's graduation several days ago. My older son and me, blurry, like a dream. But I see clearly our smiles, recalling a celebration of effort and achievement and a diploma.

For a minute I am in those sweet memories. Then my breath hitches, my gaze holds at that woman, me.

And my memory stretches back...

...to six years ago when I took my son on a tour of this same college. On that spring day, our guide walked backwards and smiled the entire two plus hours...through a campus filled with flowers and hope for the coming summer, completion of another school year. Students with parents, parents with students. Like Noah's Ark. Everyone belonged to someone in our little group. And I looked ahead to four years of college for my older son - with four years for my younger son too.

These years would be filled with challenges and growing up. For sure. Maybe a flubbed test here, a speeding ticket there. Spring breaks with beaches and parties, more friends and more grades. During the campus tour, I gulped when chemical free dorms were brought up, asking a question that embarrassed my son. My mind cinched tight around topics like how to let my child go...and how to cope with not knowing if he had returned from a night out.

And I planned for graduation ceremonies. Four to be exact. One high school and one college - two for each son, at a minimum.

If you had asked me about more...I would have said that I was excited to launch a new chapter. A first or second (or whatever number it would be) career and more trips to Kenya and other parts of the world too. Oh yes, I was looking forward to our future - our lives for the coming decade or two or four.

To lives that stretched for years.

Endless years.

Ahead.

So in February 2020, I laughed when someone warned of a coming pandemic. After all, there were graduations and next careers and trips to Africa...I understood my future.

Oh it can't be, I teased this woman at her mention of trouble, of something fearful coming our way. But after the conversation I looked up the definition of a pandemic...

...and a few days later we all woke to a different world. Right? Our new world was a Dr. Suess book...down was up and up was down, complete with dancing elephants and face masks with polka dots.

In this new world...my younger son declined to go to his high school graduation last spring. Chemo had wrecked my immune system. He probably knew that I couldn't attend the ceremony, but he never told me that I was the reason he didn't want to go. My eyes misted up to see the event on television, just as every single swim meet of his senior year.

He said, I am moving on to college...

...this chapter is done, Mom.

Then last month my older son was invited to walk in his college graduation, with only a couple academic tasks to wrap up this summer. He said he didn't want to go, he didn't need the experience. I might have blurted out...but what about me and your dad and our part to make this college thing happen? Turn the focus to what we had lost the past few years, to try to recoup something.

He said, I am moving on to a job...

...this chapter is done, Mom.

So as we left his friend's graduation a few days ago, I muttered to my son or to the air or to anyone who happened to be around...

...things didn't go as I expected, not by a long shot.

No.

But perspective is gold, right? My father used to tell my sister and me, when something had gone amiss for us..

...well you could be that dog that was sent out to space, never to return (in other words: count your blessings, girls).

We look at our disappointments and our losses and we say...well things could be worse. So much worse. And this is gratitude, a nod to our blessings. But it doesn't mean that we don't and we shouldn't feel the lost stuff, like graduation ceremonies and legs and trips and weddings and notions about immortality and parties and whole years of a grade in school and even beloved ones, by far the hardest....and we feel, well really, really, really sad and brokenhearted sometimes.

We have marinated in loss the last few years, my friends, with our expectations lying soaked around our feet. But then Richard Carlson writes, "...when you let go of your expectations, when you accept life as it is, you're free."

So I look at this photo again. Our easy smiles....reveling in the sweetness of the hour. For our friend who graduated that day, for us. For the whole wide world, for its best days and ways. Then I smile again. And I let my big expectations go - the heavy ones, the ones that used to speak of a right way, more rigid in their prediction for our best lives. And when we let these expectations fall from us....we turn from black and white to color, to indigo and turquoise and pink...and we see the beauty of some doing it this way, some doing it that way...

...to each, according to their heart. To us, according to our hearts.

After muttering to my son that things hadn't gone as I had expected, not at all, I looked eastward to see that most beautiful bird, the Phoenix. The one that rises out of ashes, soaring back into the sky. And glancing the other way, I caught my son's smile. For he had seen it too.