The Graduation Photo Collages I'll Never Have
When you move enough times throughout childhood, there is no scrapbook of consistent friendships
In Accepting the Unexpected, I step away from writing about travel to comment on the bigger journey of life. While the topics may vary, the central theme is always the same: living life means learning to deal with the unexpected.
By many metrics, I grew up in a nomadic household.
From the time I was born until the time I graduated from high school, I lived in four different states, we moved five times, and I attended six different schools. I didn’t attend the same high school as my childhood friends. I didn’t attend the same high school for all four years. I couldn’t even apply for NHS until I was a senior because of a move across the country the summer before my junior year.
I know people who lived far more nomadic lifestyles, but it certainly wasn’t a childhood or adolescence marked by the stability of consistent friendships that spanned my entire academic career.
I wanted it to be different for my own kids. I had dreams for them. I had plans for 18 years of attending the same schools with the same friends from the time they started until the time that they graduated from high school.
When I was a yearbook adviser, I was in charge of collecting senior messages with collages of my very grown-up students during every stage of their lives. As I looked through ads and messages and carefully placed them in spreads, I considered all of the photos from the years that I would want to include in my own message to my graduating children.
Now my husband and I are finally at that age where we are seeing friend after friend posting pictures of their not-so-little ones graduating from high school. While our late venture into parenthood means that we have a few more years to go before we start emptying the nest, we are getting a taste of what it means to prepare for that transition, and again, I’m looking at photo collages of our friends’ children from every stage of their lives. Some of the most adorable collages are the ones that show them with the same friends over the years, through preschool baby cheeks, elementary growth, middle school awkwardness, and finally high school maturity.
After an adolescence and young adulthood of mourning the absence of my own pictures with the same childhood friends through the years, I desperately wanted that for my own children.
That was my dream when we brought our little girl home to the south side of Indianapolis. Then a year later we moved to Fort Wayne. Five years later we moved to Houston and at the young ages of four and six, it appeared that I could somehow keep the dream alive. But six years later we moved back to Indianapolis and the dream that I had for both of my children from the time they were born lay shattered at my feet. I would never be able to create cradle-to-graduation-cap collages. I would never know what it was like to watch the same group of children grow alongside my children into young adulthood and see their friendships through all of the changes and challenges of growing up. And they would never know the gift of having friends alongside them who had known them through every stage of childhood.
I don't fault my friends for sharing adorable photos of their now graduated seniors when they were friends back in kindergarten. Truth be told, if it were me I would be that annoying mom putting my kids and their best friends through the torture of replicating poses through the years.
It’s just the difficult reality for those of us who have exchanged consistent stability in a single geographic location for new and exciting challenges and adventures. One is not better than the other, each decision bringing with it advantages and disadvantages. For me, the biggest challenge has been the loss of personal connection and history. I wish I could have spared my own children the same experiences, but life happens and we learn how to adjust our expectations to match the lives that we are given.
I’m happy for the friends who have those progressive photographs. I’m glad that their children faced a different set of challenges from knowing and being with the same people for their entire childhoods. But for those of us who will never have those photos, who feel a sharp pang every single time we see our friends post those cradle-to-graduation cap photographs, it can be a little bit too much a reminder of the things that we lost in exchange for the gain of experience.
So don’t stop sharing, don’t stop posting, and please do not feel like there is any shame in celebrating the stability that you have been able to give your children from the time you brought them home. Just know that some of us are living vicariously through your photographs, and hoping that our own children will someday forgive us for taking away their own chance to graduate with their preschool classmates.
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Please, please, PLEASE for the love of all that is holy, PLEASE stop feeling guilty for not giving your kids the childhood YOU always wanted! The truth is, the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence and the childhood you look at with longing and think was somehow “better” than your own comes with a LOT of drawbacks.
For one thing, when you look at all of the religious zealots in the country, chances are very good they never moved far from home, changed schools or were exposed to very different ideals, worldviews and mindsets growing up. In other words, they had exactly the childhood you are idolizing.
For so many of those kids, going to college (if they go to college at all) will be a massively traumatic experience for them and many will drop out and return to what is safe, comfortable and familiar. They literally have no clue how to process views other than their own because they have literally never been exposed to them.
Many will have a superior mindset. When everyone you know agrees with you and shares all the same values, it makes it incredibly easy to simply dismiss anyone who doesn’t agree with you. Even more problematic, it can make you feel persecuted when and if you ever actually become exposed to a group of people that do not share your same worldview and values. It makes you feel as if everyone is “ganging up on you” when you suddenly get thrust into a situation where the majority holds a different worldview than you and the “majority” you grow up with. This can create a “crisis of faith” many will simply run from. Others will turn away from their childhood beliefs and embrace the worldview of their new culture and in many cases can end up being ostracized by their families and communities instead.
What you see as an ideal way to raise children, I see as the blueprint for everything that is wrong with America. Yes, raising children in the same place, particularly a nice, safe small town, can create an idyllic childhood for sure, but I feel more strongly than ever that it does not raise good citizens of a diverse nation. How can you ever possibly value diversity when you have spent your entire life in enforced homogeneity?
I genuinely believe that it is only in coming smack up against contrary values, differing ideals and even different traditions and social norms that we develop empathy. Experiencing different types of community is really the only way to realize people can be very different from us and have very different values and still be “good people.”
The same way inbreeding is catastrophic genetically, I believe the same thing happens with sociological or intellectual inbreeding. If you look at where communities are smallest and most tight-knit, you will also most likely find the highest instances of abuse. Don’t believe all the picture-perfect things you see on social media.
While there is nothing wrong with raising your kids in one place, it can create tremendous difficulties in adulthood. By moving your kids to different communities and exposing them to different values and social norms, you have far better prepared them to venture into and embrace different cultural norms as adults.
Too many children raised in the insular environments of small towns can never break free of them because they’ve literally never been taught how to manage diversity because they’ve also literally never been exposed to it.
If you want to know where the majority of narrow-minded bigots come from, it is very often those small, insular communities. If you wonder why they never recognize themselves as such, it is because everyone around them thinks and believes exactly like them and if they don’t, they are often shunned. More often than not, there is no room for diversity in communities like that.
So while yes, I realize it is a very appealing image to raise your children from K-graduation in a single community, there is a very real dark side to that image as well.
I can’t imagine moving so many times in such a short and important time in your life! Although your kiddos have moved a couple times.. in the very least .. they have a mom who can completely understand the situation their going through and be a great supporter during the tricky times!