Graduation Blues

For the first time, since I started teaching part-time in a transnational business school four years ago, I missed the graduation ceremony.      

 

I am in Cambodia conducting a creative writing seminar/workshop.

Had I been there, I know I’d feel exactly the same way I did every year. Which is why I am posting the piece I wrote four years ago. Thanks to computers, it’s not rotting or misplaced in some drawer or box. It might have well been written today.

On Cloud Ten

With much interest, I watch the solemn graduation ceremony. Since it has nothing to do with any of my three sons, I am not focused on one face, but a sea of faces.

Edgy and expectant, the mothers (fathers have better muscle control) have their necks permanently cranked in the direction of their son or daughter. Their eyes, shiny and wide, blink rapidly. They are poised to watch their children walk to the last door of childhood, as they themselves struggle to contain overwhelming joy. The diploma is as much theirs as their children's. 

On cloud nine—that's the idiom that best describes this extreme elation. As a race and nation, we put a high premium on a college degree. 

"Education is all I could bequeath to you," is repeated in Filipino homes for generations. 

Even lacking in material wealth, parents work hard to send their children to college. A lot of walls are adorned with diplomas. Parents say with pride, "My children are all professionals."   

       

 

But to some us (okay, me), graduation is the great divide. Before that, our children must toe the line. After that, they can do what they want (read: get married or leave home). Done, finis. 

I have a problem with that. 

In fact, I have a personal metaphor for college graduation. It is a prism through which light passes, then separates into all colors, going in all directions. At least that was what I felt when each of my children graduated. Not on cloud nine, but a bit beyond that—on cloud ten? This feeling includes ardent pleas for grace from our Father—to unclutter my heart with the fear of "letting go"; to help these once tiny hunks continue to embrace the values I would have legislated if I could.  
  

There I am on cloud ten all over again. A good thing I am wearing a bulky toga with a hood that keeps sliding backwards, choking me. It was a welcome diversion, a perfect time to be reminded of God's admonition in Matthew 6:27, "Who of you by worrying can add a single hour to his life?"
 

The graduates, some of them my students, are wearing their best frocks underneath their black robes. Fresh from the beauty parlors of their moms, the girls are in Nine West heels. Wearing their dad's Armani neckties, the boys have abandoned their Nikes. Now clutching the rolled white paper that is their diploma, they display their retainers before the cameras while their perfumed mothers, clean-shaven fathers and bejeweled grandparents (with nurses in tow), grin beside them.

A very special day indeed.

Elsewhere, whether in very modest (or equally posh) surroundings, the same scenes are being reenacted. Having crossed the great divide, the graduates are high in spirits, teeming with smiles. Congratulations have never been uttered with more volume and exuberance.    

On cloud ten I feel all alone. I think none of the mothers in the hall has the same niggling dread about the future their children and they will have without each other.

Surely, they must know that the household landscape will henceforth change and will take some getting used to?

I spot the mother of the most outstanding student. "Your daughter will surely have a great future," my mouth moves on its own.

"You really think so?" she asks, her fearful eyes awaiting reassurance.

She is on cloud ten, I say silently, relieved that I am not alone.