How to Step Up
HOW TO STEP UP
Our daughter Q finished 8th grade in June and starts high school in the fall. These days this transition gets formally recognized by a “stepping up” ceremony modeled after high school commencement. Adult-dressed students process into the gym, speeches are given by administrators, teachers, and students, each student is called up by name for a handshake and a bag that contains a school-logo baseball cap to throw in the air like a mortar board to mark the end of 8th grade.
(I appreciate rites of passage and certainly enjoy freighting moments with meaning, but stepping-up ceremonies don’t make much sense to me. Speakers tend to pull their speeches from the shelf of commencement clichés — “Congrats! You made it! You did it!” But middle school and high school are mandatory, and 9th grade is a lot like 8th grade with a longer lunch period. The step up between them ends up being pretty modest.)
Like nearly all commencement-style ceremonies, Q’s had too many speeches that were each too long, which left me too much room to think about the insatiableness of time and the fragility of moments. One presentation brought me back, though, before sending me out again. Each child was asked to write a letter to their parents, and together the class chose bits of those letters to make composites read during the ceremony. Some went for funny, others for a niche audience (as in my daughter’s “can we still get a blowtorch?” aimed right at me). Most were flavors of thank you, for being there in tough times or for helping with homework late into the night or for simply “keeping me alive.”
It all runs together in my head, except for the last line of the next-to-last letter. “Thank you for giving me a beautiful life,” read a girl who then casually returned to her folding chair among her classmates.
What is a beautiful life, and how is one given? I puzzled over this question through the handshakes, the tossed hats, the processional out to “Don’t Stop Believing,” the photos with family and friends, the celebratory lunch of ginger chicken, phở, and chả giò with our daughter. I’m still puzzling.
If asked what kind of life we were trying to give our son and daughter, I would likely have said “full” or “rich” or “purposeful” and deliberately not “successful” (and I would have gone on about what does success really mean and anyway success as a metric is a trap). I would have said that I want them to have big lives, ones that touch and envelope many others (in a good way) as they unfold, but not so big that they miss the vastly many things larger than themselves. I would have said — and will still say — that I want them to be happy (but not too or always so). I’d even go so far as to say that I want their lives to be easy, meaning free from basic struggle and calamity, untouched by self-destruction.
When I see my answers written like this, they seem improbable. And the more I think about it, the whole notion of being able to give them a particular sort of life seems outrageous. Luck and coincidence shape us all so profoundly, circumstance a force more powerful than choice. My wife and I met during a special college program that we both applied for, but our trajectories so easily could have been different. I might have stayed in the Midwest; she could still be across the world. Together I think we’ve made, and are making, a good life, but we know we’ve arrived here mostly by taking steps up and down some paths as they’ve presented themselves to us, missing a few we probably should have taken, only occasionally making one of our own. On the way we try to do our best, organic milk and good books, broccoli and bad jokes, lessons when the kids want them and lessons when the kids need them. But who knows what will happen to any of us, and what will become of them in this breaking world.
After school ends for the year, the kids go upstate to music and arts camp for three weeks. Their time away coincides with my wife’s birthday, but the kids each remember to mail her a wish. Q has, as always, crafted a beautiful card with a flawless and delicate color gradient on the front and on the inside a thing they like to say to each other that’s precious to them both. Our son M sends his usual, a letter on a piece of plain white printer paper written in pencil. He has his own way, though. “Right now at camp I’m some of the happiest I’ve ever been,” he writes, “and you need to know that the love you show me lets me love myself.” We leave their letters open on the table for the rest of the week.
Perhaps that startling bit of M’s letter was pushed out of him by my wife’s birthday, but I’ll take it as an answer for now. To be given a beautiful life is not to have a life that others see as full of beauty; it’s making something beautiful for someone and having room to notice, even briefly and in pencil, that you can love yourself.