The Changing of the Guard

My youngest child started Kindergarten today, and with that simple ritual, I have officially moved out of the baby-toddler wheelhouse. I couldn’t be more pleased. I watched as mothers took pictures of their children, some crying and some excited, and I didn’t even think to bring a camera to document this momentous day. What a day of wonder and celebration! Where were the fireworks? The big cake? Then I realized that some of these moms weren’t experiencing the same wonder I felt—how could they? They still had youngsters hanging onto their pant-legs and buns in the oven. But I could have been a rider on a parade float waving happily goodbye to a chapter in my life that was closing.


When I think of the changing of the guard, I picture the guards at Buckingham Palace performing a ritual viewed by many as they change who is stationed at the gate. But life isn’t that way. We experience mind-blowing changes in life, but no one knows or notices. You can’t know that the lady in front of you at the checkout line just buried her son in a flag-draped casket. It’s impossible to tell that the woman putting gas in her car next to you just sent her last child to college and she’s anxious about facing the upcoming years with only her husband to talk to over breakfast. And no one at that school knew that, with a single change in number on the calendar, I no longer had children home during the day.

Today I don’t miss the dirty diapers and sleepless nights, the temper tantrums and the broken trinket that I forgot to put up before a curious hand reached it. But someday I will and there’s no going back. Once they’ve passed, those times can only be relived in memory and in photo books. That’s the thing about big changes, we have to welcome them simply because they are, but that doesn’t exempt us from wishing we had enjoyed our lives a little more “back then.” But maybe they can remind us to take the time now to feel this moment, because once you blink it’s gone.