Yesterday my eldest child finished school.
It has brought up all the feels. And I’ve been wrangling them for weeks now in the lead up to yesterday.
Her Dad died 10 days before her first day of high school.
She was 12. And she looked at me for guidance around the start of her high school year because the first day of school was scheduled to start the day after her Dad’s funeral, on January 30, 2019.
She went to that first day of high school, as she would have if nothing had happened, because that’s what she wanted to do.
I copped a lot of criticism for it.
Adults who thought they knew better who questioned it, riled against it, declaring it unreasonable, unnecessary, ridiculous, too much.
There were many many words used and I remember them all. Because I absolutely took them as a criticism of both my parenting and my child.
But it is what she wanted. She was already the kid with the dead dad, she didn’t want to be the one who also didn’t know where her locker was, or where the science room was and feel even more different.
And so in the week leading up to her Dad’s funeral to prepare for that first day, we went down the street and bought school shoes and school swimmers.
People had opinions about that, too. Being out and about. Doing ‘normal’ things.
Honestly, it gave us something to do.
And on the day after her Dad’s funeral, we lined up at 8.30am for Day 1 of Year 7.
It actually saved me from drinking a LOT of rum at Pete’s wake, having to be up and functioning so early the next day.
It looked like this:
And now we are here:
And I genuinely cannot tell you how we got from there to here.
Because I can absolutely tell you that on lots of days and weeks I wasn’t sure how we would get here.
We did Yr 7 with acute grief, and Yr 8 and 9 with Covid lockdowns and remote schooling and missing all the excursions and trips and then senior years and now VCE.
We had a period of about 3 weeks in Yr 9 where she hit rock bottom and couldn’t get out of bed and in the depths of lockdown with closed borders and telehealth useless, I had to just hope that love and time and compassion and a gentle urge each day to have a shower would get her to be able to go through the grief she hadn’t allowed herself to feel in the beginning and pull herself out the other side.
And then we did school awards and house captaincies and sport captaincies and dinner dances and speech days and yearly exams and all the things - all with no dad and this background of grief that isn’t always heavy but is like a cloud in the sky that loiters, sometimes just there but also often threatening to rain on parades or just cast a shadow over things.
But now, we’ve done it.
I don’t know how to feel about it.
The level of pride I feel towards this child who has been though and ploughed on and fallen down and pulled herself up and gritted her teeth and raged against grief and been sucked under by the weight of it and learned to kick back against it is… I genuinely can’t put into words.
It makes me cry when I think of it.
To be honest, one of the feelings is also relief. Relief that we made it. We got here. She got here.
I was so scared for so long that we wouldn’t or couldn’t make it.
Because I know every single day and night that she has had to get here.
Every good day. Every hard week. Every argument. Every laugh. Every achievement. Every failure.
And to see your child have to suffer through so much and come out the other side, and know that whatever happens from here on in she actually really and truly has the strength to handle it, is like nothing else.
It is genuinely indescribable the feeling of having to tell the kids that their dad was dead. And to have been the person who had to break their hearts and shatter their lives like that is not something I would wish on any person.
To be fair it was actually Pete who did that by dying… so probably shouldn’t take all the claim of shattering them… it is, actually, entirely his fault.
And so to see a child (well, all of them) slowly but surely piece themselves back together. To bear witness to all the strength and tenacity and fear and struggle to get up every day without being able to actually help because I can’t, this is something they have to do themselves … it has been so bloody hard and awe-inspiring.
But the parenting books need to damn-well update themselves about how emotional this whole end of school and becoming and adult, because it turns out it’s bloody hard even without the added emotion of what we have!
The books talk about toilet training and toddler tantrums, how to deal with teenagers in toxic friendships, how to discuss sex and drugs and alcohol… the books are so far behind social media that’s a whole other world of navigation parents have to deal with with zero guidance because all that has turned up between when parents were teenagers and now, when we have to parent kids with it.
They tell you how to prepare for how to deal with the first day of school, not the last day. How to navigate small person and parental anxiety around being in a big new place like primary school, but not how to handle older kids and parental anxiety about going out into the the Big Wide World.
And that teenagers can be so fun! Argumentative, opinionated, stubborn, and challenging, but also SO funny, and clever, and kind and better than I ever was at their age with things like making good choices, and brave decisions, and standing up for themselves and friends, and navigating tricky social situations with the kind of people skills I’m very sure I still haven’t mastered!
The other kids will do all this end of school stuff, too.
I get to do this ‘holy shit I’ve got them here’ next year with our second child.
I have to handle this rollercoaster and then turn around and do it all again. With a whole different set of emotions because that child has had a whole other experience of growing up and finishing primary school and then high school without her dad.
And I’m already foreseeing 5 years from now when they are all done. If this what it is like when I have 1 done, what the bloody hell is it going to feel like when I can say: Omg we are done DONE!?!
This week has already had the soul splitting challenge of navigating a child finishing school and the pride and excitement I feel around that chapter closing, and all the grief and sadness around it all happening without their Dad, while at the same time needing to turn around a help another child go through all the brand new grief and sadness associated with them becoming a school Prefect for next year, and having to deal with their first really significant high school milestone without their Dad.
At the end of her last day of school, the eldest child just looked at me burst into tears, like many other kids and parents, but she genuinely sobbed because we both know today should have her dad here but also, because only the two of us intimately know what it took to get here. Our shared experience of it isn’t shared by any of the other kids and she and I both know the heart hurt, the hard, the work, the experience we have had.
Her godfather appeared. And it was amazing - not the least of which was because of the novelty of him towering down from his 6ft 7in height and saying: well done, Dude; and hugging her. Exactly like he was meant to and needed to. We gave our kids god parents not for spirtuation guidance, but life guidance and to fill the gaps in case anything happened to one of us as parents. They are filling that role admirably.
It was a different day for the second one.
I did this whole first round of this going into Yr 12 and leadership role stuff last year with the first child. I know what this looks like. But it’s all new for this child, and I can’t approach it like it’s old hat and dismiss her feelings because I did it last year with a sibling - she needs all her own set of care and kindness and hugs and ‘I love you and he would have been so proud of you’ and time for her that looks different but the same but also not the same as what her sister needed.
And then the younger ones have been upset because all this means a change to the norm - having both big sisters at school. Losing a support person in the school grounds to find when needed. There have been tears there, too. And hugs and comfort of a different kind.
It’s also what I also learned early on, all four of them have their own ways of needing support, and needing to express their feelings, and what they need to navigate this space. And I can’t apply a one size fits all solution. And often they get that support from one another as much as me. The change to the way in which that happens from now on, is imminent.
Except hugs and love - that’s a pretty universal requirement and salve for these situations. Love and hugs.
And for this amazing human who has just finished her 13 years of schooling, who 5 years and 9 months ago, almost to the day, needed to go to school like every other Year 7 student who was starting high school in 2019... Holy smokes I am proud of her.
We have exams to go, and a valedictorian dinner to properly and formally complete her high school education, but with a gap year jillaroo job secured and 2 early entry uni offers, the pressure of it all seems much less.
And so we can all take a big deep breath, and sob thank you’s into the shoulders of the villagers who helped get us here, and one another, and say: omg we did it.
Well done Poss x
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