Please forgive the detour I took on my blog with this post.

Those of you who follow me regularly on Twitter may have noticed my absence for the last few days. The picture above explains it quite nicely (Not a great one of me, but the wife and kids look fantastic).

The last couple of weeks leading up to my daughters graduation from High School have been hectic to say the least (didn’t even have time for a desperately needed haircut as you can see above ) ). The day after her graduation we held an open house for friends and family. I am only now recovering.

Out of 533 students in her graduating class, Samantha was ranked at 19; she graduated Summa Cum Laude. To say we are proud of her would be an understatement. She is a smart, witty, and well rounded young woman (okay…this is her father saying this, so yes I am slightly biased, but others have told us this time after time). I blogged about her a couple of years ago in my post “Reflection” when I was teaching her how to drive (It seemed like only yesterday). Very soon, she’ll be leaving us for college; the tether, fully cut…

We were over at our next door neighbors house last night. They have an only son, Lewis, who also graduated, and who basically grew up with our daughter. They considered Sam the daughter they never had and we have always said Lewis was the son we never had. Lewis’ father, Rick, showed us a video he made which was a compilation of video footage and pictures of their son growing up. There was a section in the video of Sam and Lewis; watching them grow up together in the span of minutes, it took a lot for me to hold it together; my wife, of course, lost it – it was a good thing they had a box of tissues nearby.

This is a tough time for a parent. All the late nights, the sacrifices, the joys, the tears, and now your child is about to be launched into the world, in a kind of second birth, a rebirth. All we can do is sit back and watch it happen, and be there if she ever needs us.

In preparation for her road test, Sam and I were driving nights and weekends. I would set up traffic cones in the the local elementary school parking lot and we practiced the staples of the test – parallel parking, 3 point turns, and the quick stop. I will cherish these moments together for as long as I live, and I look forward to the time I will spend teaching her younger sister.

I was of the generation of Harry Chapins’ “Cat’s in the Cradle”, and it was my biggest fear that I would take my kids for granted. I have great parents who were always there for me. To that end, I have always tried to be there for my kids, even if it meant coming home from work early during an important project or getting up early on Sunday to go to a Cello lesson . There have been times that I was on the phone, pencil and paper in hand working out a tough Algebra word problem if I just couldn’t be there.

This is the thing that really sucks about being a parent; all the toil and tears and sacrifice, the sleepless nights waiting for them to come home from dates, only to see them off to college, and later, walking them down the isle to give them away to their husband-to-be. For daughters, at least, it seems you are constantly giving them away.

Then there’s the worrying, always the worrying. I’m 47, happily married and relatively successful and still, my parents worry about me. I see the future, and for me, it isn’t pretty…

Still, I wouldn’t change a thing, especially after seeing the look of sheer joy and pride in my daughter’s face after executing a perfect parallel parking maneuver in the parking lot of the elementary school she attended only a few years earlier.