I was standing by the road waiting for my ride, holding onto the large sheet of parchment paper to keep the wind from tearing or creasing it, or carrying it away.
Five minutes earlier, my daughter had given it to me for safe keeping.
“Don’t let it get wrinkled,” she said.
It was the college degree she’d been handed on the stage that morning. Bachelor of Arts it said in fancy calligraphy and some Latin. When she turned to face the photographer in the crowd, she was holding the document; it was large enough to cover most of her torso, but not her smile – you could see that from the very top bleachers.
A day like that will cause a mother to page back through the biggest moments in her child’s life – an accounting of important times to line up so that this newest one can take its rightful place in memory. This moment was right up there – up there with the day she finally found the perfect prom dress; her high school graduation; the day she brought her new college boyfriend home to meet me.
And before all of those days there was this one: In middle school, she was a fan of the boy group One Direction. At the concert, we had good seats on the floor of the arena, and when the group rode over us on an elevated platform, Grace looked up to find her beloved singers standing just above her. I snapped a photo of her pure, tearful, upturned, ridiculous joy.
Graduation held the same joy for me. After the recessional, I ran to find her in the gaggle of green caps and gowns. I tapped her on the shoulder and she turned to face me.
“Hi, Mommy,” she said, and I hugged her.
“You did it,” I said into her hair.
She told me not to cry because then she would, too. I snapped some photos, congratulated her boyfriend (also a graduate), and met his family for the first time. All of that happened in two minutes – three tops. And then I left her to celebrate with her friends. She was as happy as I’ve ever seen her.
Out there waiting in the wind, I thought about how breezily she had greeted me, as if it were just another morning. I wanted to pull her away to a quiet corner to tell her how remarkable, how significant and honorable the moment was; how earth-shaking in its accomplishment. How hard she had worked to get there. How the last two years were made miserable and difficult by COVID, and yet she prevailed. Her senior year she taught life skills to teenagers with autism. She did it! The proudness of it was choking me.
“Don’t let the paper get wrinkled,” she had said as I walked out to find my ride. She knew the importance of that document, something to frame and hang on a wall to show what she’d done. When I got home, I rolled the diploma and slid it into the green tube that came with it. Such a humble receptacle for something so profound.
That coiled piece of parchment cannot hold all that it means to me and her family, or to her; it cannot do justice to the commencement ceremony, or the accomplishment of graduating, or to the four years that preceded it. Nor can these 600 words I’m writing here.
Raising Grace has been a happy thing. That day was among the happiest, for me and for her, too. It was right there on her face – upturned, joyous, happy.
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