Last first day

Brian Wilson

This coming week the Wilson household will mark its last, first day of high school.

My son, Alex, is entering his senior year at Medford Area Senior High School. As with most parents who watch their children grow up all too fast, I find this milestone to be more bitter than sweet.

With the inevitable passage of time all those “last times” of being a parent of a high schooler will be taking place in the coming months. Those concerts and shows that seem to drag on forever will seem far too short and done all too soon. Those trips to watch competitions that seemed a disruption will have me questioning why I didn’t put family over work and make time to be there more often.

I am sure I will mellow out to the idea of it given enough time or when I become frustrated over Alex needing to get homework assignments and projects completed at the last minute. Just as I am sure that when the inevitable senior slide hits come next spring I will grow increasingly annoyed as I did when his older sister went through that phase.

As someone who has watched from the sidelines a literal generation of area children grow from youth to adulthood and on to having children of their own, you would think I would be more resistant to the emotional aspects of watching my own children growing up. That I would not look at Alex towering over his mother and sister and think back to the blonde-haired little boy who used to be waist high and would spend hours when he should have been asleep creating massive intricate towers of stuffed animals and then dragging his mother and me into his room to take pictures of him with them.

Being a parent is much the same for everyone. There are choices that have to be made, deadlines that have to be met and times when you are frustrated, angry or amused. There is also the inevitable second-guessing and regrets.

When Alex was a young boy he tied a piece of rope he found onto a stick to make what he said was a fishing pole. He would badger me constantly about wanting to go fishing with me.

My apologies to all those anglers out there, but I have neither the patience nor the skill to find fishing enjoyable. I am perfectly content to sit by a pond or stream and sip a cool drink without needing to use sharp hooks or invest in rods and reels.

Alex wanted to go fishing with me and would carry his make-shift pole around on the off chance I would give in. A side effect of him carrying it around would be him leaving it in random places.

Coming home from work one day, he was waiting for me by the door and I accidentally stepped on his makeshift pole on the sidewalk and broke it. Not thinking, I casually picked it up and tossed it in the nearby garbage can.

Even now more than a decade later, I can still clearly remember seeing his face drop from excitement to sadness in the span of a heartbeat. It was never about a stick with a piece of string, but about wanting to spend time with me and being brushed aside. We are judged in our children’s eyes.

The other day I was chatting with my siblings and a comment was made about our father and how he always was working, taking overtime calls whenever they came. For him the idea of work-life balance was that he needed to work in order to have his family’s books balance. I worry that my children will some day have the same conversations about me.

As we enter into the first of the lasts, my goal is to make a point to be there as much as possible so that I can share in those memories and live vicariously through the open door of my son’s future. I’ll let you know in about nine months how that worked out for us.

Brian Wilson is News Editor at The Star News.