Graduation and Commencement

Reflections at Dawn - Hahns Peak and Pearl Lake. June, 2025

Today, May 1, my daughter graduates with her BS in Environmental and Sustainability Studies from the University of Utah. I feel all the ways you might expect: proud, excited, happy, curious, thrilled and definitely awed. Some of that awe stems from the fact that she earned her degree in two years. Some of it stems from the person my daughter is: caring, generous, fun, driven, athletic, self-aware, and adventurous. Some of it stems from the way she approaches life, a confidence to take on new things without holding back. This isn’t just because she’s young. It is how she engages with living, and it is inspiring.

Along with the expected ways I feel about Charlotte completing her undergraduate education, I notice something else. A tightness in the center of my stomach, a tinge of heaviness at the back of my heart. She’s travelled the educational conveyor belt from preschool to university, and is now jumping off into the world at large. With this discernible step into real independence - working full-time, creating a structure for her life that is dictated fully by her choices and not by her parents, teachers, or an educational institution - as her parent I feel a bit…irrelevant.

When Charlotte first came onto the scene, there was a moment of tremendous resistance and heel dragging on my part. I had an identity - endurance athlete, runner, cyclist, and though married, an independent woman. To shift into being a mother was, to me, a departure almost unfathomable. At 38, I didn’t want to have someone dependent on me, and I certainly didn’t want to give up my athletic and independent identity to be a mom. I didn’t know how to be a mom.

But, something had been happening. From the early days of my pregnancy, what I felt for this being inside me was growing along with her. The visceral love and literal connection I experienced was profound - the “not knowing how to be a mom” was no match for that. My resistance, and my old identity, subsided as I found myself completely immersed in mama-hood.

Parenting is hard. From sleepless nights to figuring out needs without words to saying “NO!” and the response is to look you in the eye and do it anyway. From being right where you laid them down to crawling across the house in three seconds flat to scampering out of reach with a delighted giggle. From looooong, even boring, days at the park to being awakened at 2am to continue an argument over the pajamas to full-on meltdowns. And as your child moves from little one to teen and beyond, you exchange one set of difficulties for another, again and again. 

But here’s the thing - you have a clear purpose. You know your place as a parent, however imperfectly. 

As a parent I had (and still have) two unequivocal goals. To see my daughter, truly and deeply, for the person she is. To learn about her, and myself - the dynamic between us, and how I could become a better person and thus a better mother. These aims were challenges that I was not always equal to, and at times I failed badly. But the goals were my guiding principles, and no matter how low or exhausted I felt, I always knew my purpose. 

Today, those goals are still guiding me, but feel less immediate. My tasks as a parent - chauffeuring, planning, baking, medical/dental appointments, etc., etc. were often the structure by which I could focus on my parenting goals, and thus feel my purpose in real time. But those tasks, which have been waning for years, are done now, and this graduation feels like the true take-off. She stands fully in her own life, which is amazing and exactly right - and yet I feel disoriented.

It isn’t like I can go back and pick up where I left off twenty years ago. I certainly am not the same body and mind I was at 38. I am grappling with being the parent of an adult, and how to dip my toe into what’s next, and I feel somewhat lost because for 20 years - I was “Charlotte’s mom.” 

I have written about the idea of looking forward with my current running abilities rather than comparing them to my past. But this shifting of identity is different. This is about bringing forward the mom parts of me and the me parts of me, so that I’m a melding of pre-mom and mom, and maybe something altogether new.

There’s a story that Clarissa Pinkola Estés shares about her Uncle Zovár, a Hungarian WWII refugee that her father helped bring to their tiny farming village in northern Michigan. When Estés was very young the U.S. government seized land from their town to put in a highway. The construction work destroyed the nearby wood that was precious to the townspeople, and Uncle Zovár was devastated, as this triggered memories of all that was taken from him during the war as a peasant farmer in “the old country.” When the construction was finished, the highway was at some distance from the town and so the destruction of the wood was unnecessary after all. Uncle Zovár headed out one morning with a hoe, and began to dig a deep trench on one side of the now flattened wood - more a field at this point. Neighbors, many of whom also had roots in the old country, joined him in the trench digging, until the field was a giant rectangle framed by the deep trench. Uncle Zovár then set fire to the field and the once living things that had been laid to waste, the trench containing the flames. He sat watch over the fire all night long, Estés at his side. 

The next day, the field was flat, blackened, and lay open to the sky. Estés asked if they should plant seed. But Uncle Zovár explained to her that their work had been to prepare the soil. The field was now fertile ground, and they would leave it be - to let grow what would grow. The breeze would blow in what it would. Birds flying overhead would drop what they would. Critters large and small would track into the field what they would. New life would come. 

Time passed, and the field did become a wood. Full of new plants, trees, and wildlife.
​Full of new life.