Celebrating Transitions

If you are reading this, you're welcome to do so. But in my heart, as I write this, I know this post is meant for my son.

We just enjoyed our second wedding of the summer. It was a fantastic affair. My favorite part was the vows which were heartfelt, emotional, indicative of a deep love, and in one case, quite funny.

The wedding got me thinking. You see, our son came to attend the wedding of his cousin. (Like me, he has a lot of cousins, though he has only seven first cousins to my eight, but when you expand beyond that, he has all of mine and all of his mother's side. So he's got me beat.) This made me contemplative, perhaps even philosophical. I was trying to explain to my son why having these happy occasions matter, why we want to attend them, what they really represent.

My son with his mother at the wedding. (It was very informal.)

Of course, he's not a parent, he doesn't see it the same way I do. To him, a graduation ceremony is a long, arduous process. In his words, "boring." And I admit that most of the graduation ceremony is watching other people cross the stage, hearing names of people I don't know, seeing them shake the hands of deans and provosts that I don't know. But for those seven seconds that it is my child crossing the stage, that his name (or her name) is announced, and when he is shaking the hands of strangers, that makes it all worth it to me. The entire proceeding seems wonderful.

Of course a wedding is even more eventful to a parent. That is an entire ceremony (and party afterward) dedicated to your child (and one other person, but still a lot more concentrated than a graduation.)

Why are these events so important to us? I think it is about our shared human experience. We all have finite lives. We grow, first up, and then old. And along the way we have other people who mean so much to us. We want to celebrate our shared experience of growth.

When my kids were living at home, I saw them growing everyday. But it was incremental, such a tiny change from one day to the next. Then you look at your kids one day and marvel that they are so different than they were a year ago, or a decade ago, or since they were babies. But special moments make us take note of how much they have grown and changed. We build rituals around them, we call them rites of passage. Why? I believe that there is something deep in our psyche that needs to mark the changes, to celebrate what those who mean the most to us have become and to imagine what they will become in the future. A graduation marks the end of one phase of life and the start of a new adventure. A wedding is the fusion of two beautiful souls into one family, ready to face the future together.

These are the sorts of things we can't celebrate everyday. If we did, they wouldn't feel momentous, they wouldn't feel special. Each of us only gets a few such ritualistic moments of grandeur. And that's why it is so important to attend when you can, to celebrate when given the chance.

This summer we got to attend two different weddings, to see two separate couples become two beautiful families. And I imagine some of the wonders they have in store in their futures. Maybe they will have children and continue this cycle of rites. Even as the world changes, as society reshapes itself in each generation, there are some things so intrinsically human that they repeat.

I think much of this passed right over my son's head. He's not yet at a point that he feels the joyous explosion of humanity in such events. One day, maybe he will, though probably not before another graduation comes his way. When it does, I hope he will accept the "boredom" of the moment to let us savor the transition and celebrate him. Because he is a part of me and a part of his mother in a way I can't explain to him in words. I'll try my best to explain it in behaviors, actions, and love.