The Writing Mamas Daily Blog
Each day on the Writing Mamas Daily Blog, a different member will write about mothering.If you're a mom then you've said these words, you've made these observations and you've lived these situations - 24/7.
And for that, you are a goddess.
Monday, July 30, 2007
Reunion
The flight home from Boston to SFO is over five hours and we don’t have our kids this time. That means five hours of flipping peacefully through Newsweeks and Oprahs and lip-reading the actors’ lines in the straight-to-video box office bombs that United forces you watch despite your best intentions to read War & Peace. Thank God my headphones don’t work. I look out at the clouds, so puffy.
My husband and I are on our way back from our 20th high school reunion. We went to the same high school outside of Boston, were in the same class, and, later in life, re-found each other and ended up living “happily ever after” with three kids, a dog, and a white picket fence. Ok, scrap the fence, but the rest is true.
This was my first reunion since graduation in ‘87. Teens of the ‘80s – Madonna, Billy Idol – with hardly a Rebel Yell and always ready for a holiday, our class of 85 students skipped through our four years, high on Fresca and high-school hormones. We were “a good class” without extreme bullies and with a strong female force.
Twenty years later, we step into the tented, reunion event on the senior quad – a sacred ground that only teachers, visitors and seniors are allowed to walk on during the school year. As a freshman, it is a terrifying patch of grass, filled with threats of humiliation by a squad of seniors if you are caught with a toe on it. Now it’s just another square patch of grass I don’t even give a thought to as my high-heels squash down into the turf, marring its pomposity.
Everyone is exactly the same at our 20th, except nicer all around. The hormonal, cocky sheen of high-school attitude has been replaced by the humble reality of being hit by “real life” over the last twenty years. Jobs, babies, parents, hair, friends, youth lost. Everyone’s been hit by something, and there’s almost a “truce” feeling – an eagerness to connect – with everyone who’s made the effort to come. Geeks sit with beauties. Jocks joke with wallflowers. The old high-school labels hover slightly, but are ignored. We all want to make this work.
My husband and I visit the tree honoring a classmate who died our freshman year. It sits quietly at the end of the football field, looking into the entrance of our school. We take off our shoes and lie down, looking up, through the leaves that are so much higher now after twenty years. Would he be here today? Would he be nicer, too? I hope so. He would.
Back on the plane, I switch to my Vogue. Some mush for my brain. I feel content, a feeling that I rarely felt in high school. The pressure to be someone I am not, or don’t understand, is gone. I am just me, and I realize how lovely that is.
By Annie Yearout
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My husband and I are on our way back from our 20th high school reunion. We went to the same high school outside of Boston, were in the same class, and, later in life, re-found each other and ended up living “happily ever after” with three kids, a dog, and a white picket fence. Ok, scrap the fence, but the rest is true.
This was my first reunion since graduation in ‘87. Teens of the ‘80s – Madonna, Billy Idol – with hardly a Rebel Yell and always ready for a holiday, our class of 85 students skipped through our four years, high on Fresca and high-school hormones. We were “a good class” without extreme bullies and with a strong female force.
Twenty years later, we step into the tented, reunion event on the senior quad – a sacred ground that only teachers, visitors and seniors are allowed to walk on during the school year. As a freshman, it is a terrifying patch of grass, filled with threats of humiliation by a squad of seniors if you are caught with a toe on it. Now it’s just another square patch of grass I don’t even give a thought to as my high-heels squash down into the turf, marring its pomposity.
Everyone is exactly the same at our 20th, except nicer all around. The hormonal, cocky sheen of high-school attitude has been replaced by the humble reality of being hit by “real life” over the last twenty years. Jobs, babies, parents, hair, friends, youth lost. Everyone’s been hit by something, and there’s almost a “truce” feeling – an eagerness to connect – with everyone who’s made the effort to come. Geeks sit with beauties. Jocks joke with wallflowers. The old high-school labels hover slightly, but are ignored. We all want to make this work.
My husband and I visit the tree honoring a classmate who died our freshman year. It sits quietly at the end of the football field, looking into the entrance of our school. We take off our shoes and lie down, looking up, through the leaves that are so much higher now after twenty years. Would he be here today? Would he be nicer, too? I hope so. He would.
Back on the plane, I switch to my Vogue. Some mush for my brain. I feel content, a feeling that I rarely felt in high school. The pressure to be someone I am not, or don’t understand, is gone. I am just me, and I realize how lovely that is.
By Annie Yearout
Labels: Annie Yearout
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