The Last Fun Run

& the end of an era

Hi, Friend.

It’s graduation time. I have friends whose kids are leaving college and friends whose kids are leaving high school. I’m seeing preschool grad pics and middle-school grad pics. In our house this week, my youngest is leaving elementary school. It’s the only elementary school that he and his older sister attended, so I’ve had at least one child there since 2014.

Ten years! Sometimes it feels like a decade; sometimes it feels like ten minutes.

Parents, I know you know.

Q: Is there anything cuter than a homemade preschool mortarboard? A: No.

I’m a sucker for traditions, and my children’s elementary school has lots of them. On the second-to-last day of school, there’s a “rising up” ceremony for the fifth graders who are heading to middle school. They wear matching tee shirts, sing a song, do a choreographed dance together, receive awards, and there’s also a slide show of baby and childhood photos of each student. I will be crying through that ceremony in a few days. I’ll also be laughing, because the dance is hilarious, choreographed to the Kidz Bop version of Dua Lipa’s “Dance the Night” from the Barbie movie. Rhett taught it to me, and we’ve been practicing in the living room.

On the last day, there’s a “clap out” for the fifth graders as they leave their elementary school for the last time. Parents, grandparents, and neighbors make a corridor for the kids to walk through by forming a double line, and we all clap and cheer as the kids exit the building. I walked over last year to clap out the fifth graders, even though none of them was my child. This is what we do here.

This year, I’ll be clapping and cheering for my son. My daughter will be with me. Yes, I’ll be wearing sunglasses so I can cry in semi-privacy. Tears of joy mostly, but it’s bittersweet.

Parents, I know you know.

Which brings me to the Fun Run, one of my favorite traditions. At the end of the school year, they close the roads in our neighborhood, and the kids run a race that starts and ends at the school. The kindergartners and first graders only run a block, the second and third graders run a little farther, and the oldest grades run the greatest distance. Neighbors come out and line the streets to cheer the kids on and take photos. Some houses blast music or run sprinklers for the kids to pass through. A handful of high-school seniors, done with their classes and with a few days free before graduation, come each year to run alongside the kids and encourage them to keep going.

I love how seriously people in my neighborhood take the Fun Run. It’s on our calendars for months. My friend Marybeth, who bought a bullhorn years ago just to shout at her kids during the race, hosts a bunch of us at her house on the race route. She always puts out a table with little cups of water. This year a house around the corner had a misting machine and was blasting the theme song from Chariots of Fire.

Respect. I love when people fully commit.

Standing in the hot sun, watching my son float past, smiling—he’s such a natural runner, so light on his feet—I definitely felt like the past ten years were more like ten minutes. He was a round-faced, curly-headed toddler when his sister started kindergarten in 2014, and now he’s all arms and legs, and only a head shorter than me.

There are days when I wish I could have just ten minutes with the toddler he was, and the toddler my daughter was. Just ten more minutes of holding them, carrying them around, seeing their little dimpled hands and rubberband wrists. But I’m so proud of the people they’re both becoming, and I love knowing them at these ages. I’ve loved every iteration of them, and I look forward to loving the next iterations, and the next, and the next.

Parents, I know you know.

I’ll leave you with a note-to-self from Keep Moving, something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately as I get nostalgic.

So here’s to the firsts and the yet-unseen nexts that are coming. This year’s Fun Run isn’t really my last at all. I’ll go next year, to Marybeth’s house, to cheer on children who don’t belong to me, but who just by living in this neighborhood are ours.

If you have graduates in your life this year, from preschool to grad school, congratulations to you and to them.

Love,
Maggie