Somewhere between corsages, cap-and-gown photos, tiny graduation gowns held together by Velcro and prayer, and the annual appearance of wobbly-legged Bambi in the backyard, May quietly turns adults into emotional hostages.
For educators, especially, this month is emotional
whiplash season. One minute, you’re applauding a pre-K graduate who just
learned how to zip their own coat and sing three verses of a song about
friendship. The next minute, you’re watching seniors walk across a stage,
wondering how the little kid who used to forget homework, lunchboxes, and
occasionally their own shoes is suddenly moving into a dorm room three states
away.
Time, apparently, does not ask permission.
For high schoolers, May means Prom Season. For me, my
mind always drifts back to my own prom in 1980. Awkward, memorable, and
operating under universal law that no teenager has ever fully known what they
were doing in formalwear.
Before When Harry Met Sally... there were awkward prom
photos, rented tuxes, corsages dying in real time, and teachers pretending not
to notice slow dancing from three feet away. The girl I took to prom secretly
had a crush on one of my best friends. Naturally, he took the girl I secretly
adored and followed around like a lost puppy. We were basically living inside a
lost Disney Channel pilot episode called Everybody Loves Somebody Else.
Love, for me, was mostly observational in those days. Some
people peak romantically in high school. I apparently majored in emotional
support character. Still, there was something magical about it all. Cheap
cologne. Nervous laughter. Terrible dance moves. The strange certainty that
your entire future depended on whether somebody saved you from the last slow
dance.
Meanwhile, Pre-K and Kindergarten graduations remain
one of humanity’s purest forms of joy. Tiny humans proudly sing songs they
barely learned three weeks ago. Parents crying while filming vertically on
phones with 2% battery life remaining. Grandparents clapping like they’re
watching Carnegie Hall. Teachers smiling with the exhausted satisfaction of
people who survived an entire year explaining why crayons should not go in
noses. Most of us leave thinking the tuition was money well spent.
Then come the 8th-grade commencements. The pomp and
circumstance. Proud parents. Proud grandparents. Scholarship announcements.
High school principals arrive like college athletic recruiters trying to draft
the next generation of saints, scholars, athletes, musicians, and future
tuition-paying families.
At SSP School, we celebrate not just the graduates but
also the parents who are graduating. Some families finish a nine-year journey.
Others have spent seventeen consecutive years making tuition payments that
probably qualified as a second mortgage.
That deserves a standing ovation and possibly complimentary counseling.
While students prepare to leave home for the first
time, parents quietly wrestle with the reality that “home” may never feel quite
the same again. When I left for San
Antonio in 1980, I had no idea I would spend the next four years working
summers near Austin, Texas, returning to Kansas City mostly for Thanksgiving
and Christmas breaks. By 21, I had officially “run away from the circus,”
though in fairness, every family probably feels like a traveling carnival at
some point.
This time of year even nature joins the emotional
conspiracy. The backyard suddenly fills with baby rabbits, birds, and squirrels
stumbling through life on shaky legs. Every spring, my brain drifts back to
Bambi and that moment when Thumper explains that when animals fall in love,
they become “twitterpated.” Which may still be the greatest word Disney ever
invented.
Then there’s the part of May few people outside
education fully understand: the staffing meetings. In schools blessed with
veteran teachers, administrators inevitably face the bittersweet reality of
retirements during one of the worst teacher shortages in modern history. I’ve
attended graduations at universities once known as “teacher factories,” institutions
that used to produce classrooms full of future educators.
Now they graduate only a handful. The pipeline has
slowed to a trickle while the need keeps growing. That reality hits differently
when you’ve spent decades watching generations of students grow up in
fast-forward.
Yesterday, I saw photos of a college friend and a fellow
Knights of Columbus brother proudly wearing his doctoral regalia. Dr. Holley
finally earned the title he worked so hard for, and I felt genuinely happy for
him and his family.
But if I’m being truthful, there was also a whisper of
“what if?” Years ago, my advisor, Dr. Scotty Scott, God rest his soul,
repeatedly encouraged me not to stop with my master’s in educational leadership.
More than once, his hand hovered over doctoral paperwork waiting for my
signature.
He believed in me. Sometimes that’s all the motivation
any of us really need.
Back then, I resisted. There wasn’t much incentive
beyond the title itself, though I did enjoy the Three Stooges “Calling Dr.
Howard, Dr. Fine, Dr. Howard!” gag from Men in Black. For years, before I fully
embraced using Darrel publicly, I often wrote my name as D. Greg Sturgill. Many
people assumed the “D.” stood for doctor because I worked in educational
leadership.
That led to several awkward conversations in which I
had to clarify that, no, I was not secretly moonlighting as a brain surgeon. I
never liked overemphasizing credentials anyway.
Still, every spring I think back to defending my
thesis before Drs. Scott and Bill Rebori, while Dr. Karen Tichy quietly coached
me beforehand: smile, nod, be respectful, and let them do their thing. As they
dissected my research, some of which admittedly contained ideas floating
somewhere between innovative and completely detached from practical reality, I
tried passionately defending concepts I genuinely believed could work.
Eventually, I received subtle nudges. Then stronger
nudges. Finally, Dr. T stomped on my foot under the table as if to say: “stop
talking and survive the process.”
Honestly, maybe that should have warned me about
doctoral life right there.
But this is what May does.
It makes us revisit old dreams, unfinished roads,
missed chances, and unexpected blessings all at once. It reminds us of who we
were, who we became, and the strange winding path connecting the two.
Prom pictures become grandparents. Kindergarten
graduates become college freshmen. Young teachers become retirees. Students
become parents sitting in the same folding chairs we once watched from
ourselves.
Every spring reminds us of one unavoidable truth:
Life keeps graduating whether we’re ready or not.
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