Make It Last

Ep 35 “Listen To Your Mother” Founder... College Search Season Is Upon Us

Make It Last

It’s a ritual.

Every August since 2003, I’ve sat at the dining room table with a giant stack of school registration forms, a pen, and originally my address book, now my iPhone, so I can fill out the bajillion forms necessary to enroll a child in an Oakland public school. “Why can’t they carry over the information from last year and just let us update what’s changed?” I mutter every year, as I thumb through stacks of paper labelled “Technology Use Agreement” and “PTSA Application” and “Student Emergency Form,” the latter in triplicate. Multiply times two children, for their 13-year educational overlap, and it tests the most patient form filler.

“Why don’t they automate this?” I have sighed, every year, as my hand cramps up.

Fifteen years later, in the Year of Our Lord 2018, Oakland public schools have finally automated school registration. Of course, it being OUSD, online registration is only automated to a point, and you still have to print the packet out and bring it to school in person the week before classes start. They still don’t carry over last year’s information.

But it hit me with force Monday night as I typed in all the information: they finally did it, just in time for me to fill out these forms for the last time ever.

With our younger daughter entering her senior year of high school later this month, the “lasts” are going to start flying fast and furious around here, as we navigate back to a territory in which we haven’t lived since 1998: Kid-Free. Every marker we pass that centers on our kids – Back to School Night, Halloween, school finals season – will mark the final beat in a rhythm by which my husband and I have marked our day-to-day lives, for twenty years.

(The last Nutcracker this December, after ten years of being a ballet mom, may require therapy and prescription meds. On the other hand, I may be jubilant that I never, ever have to sit through the Sugar Plum Fairy solo or pay ballet school tuition again. Stay tuned to see which direction I veer!)

Every part of our days has kept time with the kids in some way, for two decades – get up so you can wake them up! Make them breakfast! Take them to school! Pick them up from school and feed them again! Drive them back and forth to ballet! Nag them to go to bed! And…repeat.

It’s so unusual in life to actually know the last time you’ll do something – kiss a loved one goodbye, play a favorite sport, see Tom Petty in concert. Having a heads-up is a fortunate thing. My hope is that I don’t take any of these “lasts” for granted in the year ahead.

I’m not a moper, I have more than enough activities to fill my time, and next year won’t be my first visit to the Send-A-Kid-To-College Rodeo. I don’t feel like I’m going to fall apart when next year’s Back-To-School sales circulars start appearing.

I just have no idea how I’m going to organize my days.

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My new music pick of the week: Swedish dance hall queen Robyn finally has a new single out this week, “Missing U.” Seems like it could be my theme song next fall.

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Hey! Want to hang out next Friday August 10, 7 pm? I’ll be interviewing author Todd Stadtman at A Great Good Place for Book‘s in Oakland’s Montclair neighborhood about his newest novel, So Good It’s Bad. Come hear this talented writer talk about his latest project and say hello to me!

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