In less than 10 hours, my baby girl will be taking her final walk, getting her diploma, and becoming a HS graduate.
As I sit here thinking about what's about to happen in the morning, I'm starting to tear up. It seems like only yesterday I was in the hospital, holding my wife's hand as she was shaking her head and sobbing, saying "I can't do it... I can't do it," while giving birth to our daughter, encouraging her by telling her what an amazing job she was doing and how proud I was of her.
She had no drugs. No epidural. She gave birth naturally, pushed through the pain that as descriptive as I can be in my writing, I have no words to describe what it must have felt like. Nor would I, because that is an experience which is as alien to me as trying to describe a walk on the moon or some distant planet. I would be doing every woman who has given birth a disservice by attempting to describe what it must have felt like.
When it was over, the tears that ran down her face were not of pain, but joy and love as she held our daughter, who we named DeAnna, in her arms for the first time.
And then in the blink of an eye, DeAnna was no longer a newborn baby but an infant in her bouncy chair, smiling and laughing as she waved her arms back and forth, causing the bouncy chair she was in to scoot across the floor. Even back then it seemed she had my sense of humor, as the more my wife and I laughed at the almost comical scene, the more DeAnna would wave her arms up and down.
The moment she would walk across the stage and get her HS diploma was light years away back then. But now it seems like those years flew past at the speed of light. Where did the time go? I swear she was just a baby a minute ago! I look over my shoulder, and that infant in the bouncy chair has grown up into a young woman who is spreading her wings and testing them out.I'm proud of her. So damn proud. That's part of why the tears are trickling down my face right now. I'm in awe at how intelligent she is. I'm amazed that as dark and dismal as this world seems to have become with everything going on in it, she's such a bright light within it. DeAnna knows who she is and who she wants to be.
The tears fall as well because I know that in when she spreads her wings in a few short hours, it won't be to just move them back and forth to test them out. It will be to take that first flight. And in the fall, those wings are going to carry her out of the nest and off to college.
She's not only intelligent, funny, and caring, but coming from a gamer family, she's been a gamer herself since she was probably ten years old. So it seems only appropriate to honor her in gamer terms: All Grown Up. Achievement unlocked! 💖💖💖
