Jun 1, 2018 4 min read

The kites and their flyers were trying.

My friend Gina took me to a lake, to a sandy stretch known as kite beach – named that because the waterfront there is earmarked for kites and the people who fly them.

That day wasn’t really windy enough for the big kites to go sailing, but the kite people took advantage of what breeze there was, ringing their little campsites with pinwheels and paper seagulls. The beach was planted with colorful bits of fabric and paper.

Gardening for the wind, I said.

Right then, I was conjuring a second metaphor, something to match this feeling of sadness and loss and change that’s been lurking under the surface. As I watched the kites struggle toward the sky, something in me got knocked loose.

“Graduation’s going to wreck me, ” I said.

Gina didn’t need more than that to confirm what I was feeling. She went through the same thing last year at this time, when her two sons graduated from high school and headed for college. I’ll be sending off just one, my daughter.

There’s plenty of symbolism in high school graduation. Symbols will be invoked, again and again, in commencement speeches chock full of platitudes about stars and rainbows.

But kites are better. Is there a more appropriate way to describe the necessary forfeitures of motherhood than a bright object connected to me by a slender thread?

Since Grace was born, she’s been at one end of the string and I’ve been at the other – mostly holding on but, as she grew, letting out a bit of the string and feeling the tug as the wind pulled her farther away. I recall plenty of reeling back in, but that could only last so long before the next gust pulled her back out.

(Although the flying thing is metaphor for me, for Gina it is real. Her son sends his kite up and then, if it’s windy enough, he hangs from the string while performing aerial stunts. The sight and hidden meaning of that must overwhelm her.)

The more common comparison, that idiom about cutting apron strings, is all wrong, because it ends with the child sitting on the floor, grounded and stunted at her mother’s feet. Children are supposed to get airborne.

“I hate that after graduation, she’ll always be less here,” I said to Gina.

“Has to happen,” she said.

“If we don’t let them go now, they end up owning 30 cats and living with mommy the rest of their lives,” I said, trying to make myself feel better.

“I would be OK with that,” she said, with no sarcasm. She was putting words to my small, secret and selfish thought: I would like my kids to stay young and with me forever.

Grace will graduate from high school tonight. She’s decorated her mortarboard cap with the name of the college she’ll attend. I’ll watch her walk across the stage, and she’ll pose for a photo with me and the family. But then I’ll lose track of her as she is swallowed by the crowd of classmates scrambling out the door.

“I’ll be wrecked all summer, ” I told Gina again as I looked out across the water.

She didn’t have to say anything, because we have this thing in common now. Even though it’s thrilling to watch a beautiful kite flying higher and higher, my friend knows what lies at the other end of the string. She knows that, today at least, that breeze blowing across my cheek feels hard, and cold.