Commencement Address for 2024, Class of One
A pretty remarkable something happened last week, on a random rainy midday in May: the last of my kids officially finished high school at the kitchen table of our homeschool evaluator. Piper did it without a mortarboard and gown or any of her peers beside her, in part because she finished a year early. As we stood up with her diploma, I pointed out that she’s missing a commencement address and asked if I could write my own keynote, a proud tribute to her class of one. She agreed, (if she can read it first.) The backpack that she slung easily over her shoulder as we walked out into the drizzle was stuffed with a portfolio containing all of her high school work, and a year of college credit to boot.
“Mom,” she used to say as we trekked to Arcadia University, Bryn Athyn College and Bucks County Community College in search of classes that would fulfill her academic requirements and fuel her interests, “feel my bag. Come on, just try to lift it.”
To say I am proud of her is the mother of all understatements.
To say this was an easy road would be a lie. Halfway through 10th grade, we withdrew Piper from the parochial school system in our town for reasons that are not the focus of this essay. Without being hyperbolic, this difficult decision may have been an instrumental part of saving her life.
Upping the ante on this choice—we have no brick and mortar public school in our district. As I heard her explain to Max’s UMiami friends over spring break when they were trying to figure out how his sixteen-year-old sister was also on break from college, “While everyone has a federal right to a free, public education, proximal districts are not required to accept you as a student, since you don’t pay their taxes.” Which is true. Our district’s anemic answer to public education is PA Cyber, and with enough of a sour taste in our mouths from online school during Covid, we returned to our homeschool roots and built a curriculum from local colleges. Fortunately, J and I both have jobs with some flexibility and were able to drive Miss Daisy, working many laptop hours from libraries and parking lots of institutions of higher education. In the middle of last year, Piper got her license and drove herself thirty minutes to community college where she completed a full course load, all A’s.
The challenges were not purely parental/logistical—figuring out how to get a fifteen-year-old to class—there were also hurdles for Piper to navigate. Not only did she have to acclimate to professors and course loads assuming young adult levels of agency and responsibility, a quiet student who would prefer to fly beneath the radar had to deal with well-meaning questions like those in her Statistics 110 class: How old were you when you started college? and How many pets do you have at home? where honest answers caused heads to swivel. (Really? Who has six cats?!) She also dealt with grown men who assumed a young woman on a college campus, dressed in sweatpants/hoodie and wearing obvious Do-Not-Disturb headphones while studying in the library was interested in their advances.
“In addition to the pepper spray you got me for Christmas, I need a T-shirt that says, I AM UNDERAGE & JUST HERE TO LEARN.”
While we are no strangers to homeschooling, in the US and abroad, I also worried aloud to one of my friends about what it would mean for Piper to miss out on the “traditional high school experience”. She asked me something that stopped me in my tracks: How many of your traditional high school experiences — the awkward dances, the immature behavior, the bullying, the eight hours of forced babysitting, the freaking lunch table politics— do you really want to live over?
Last fall, Piper and I spent most of our lunch hours climbing at the gym around the corner from her Arcadia classes. We downed WaWa bowls in the car and went back to our respective grinds, a little sweaty, chalk dusted and smiling. There was nowhere else I would have rather been.
Before you worry about my homeschooled child’s lack of structure and social life, she was able to play on a club field hockey team and our kitchen is constantly humming with the chatter of teenage girls making frozen fruit whip, pavlovas and creme brûlée while binge watching episodes of Bones and Naked and Afraid. What this has done is enabled Piper to maintain the relationships she chooses while creating distance from the often-messy social dynamics that are hallmarks of high school. Somewhere along the way, she found deeper confidence in her voice as well. The girl who once worried about ordering at restaurants can now set up meetings to advocate for herself with professors. She banters with her adult coworkers at the ice rink and has lunch at Tyler Park with her lab partner from Chemistry. “I mean, she’s twenty-six, but you’d like her. She’s cool.” Friday mornings, she has a standing date with her five-year-old cousin Lumen for science experiments and art projects.
Still I worried about the things she might be missing because of this non-traditional path and suggested ways we might simulate some of the milestones.
“Lots of people do senior photos. Do you want to go dress shopping and do a professional photo shoot somewhere?”
“Have you met me?” she replied, complete with one of her withering glances, which can strip the petals off the hardiest of daisies.
Our homeschooling evaluator suggested we go to the Halloween store for a cap and gown, to take a picture for posterity.
Piper rolled her big brown eyes, but the blue triangle in the corner of her left one twinkled.
“Look, the best you’re going to get is when we go up to Ithaca for Hayden’s graduation, I will put on his mortarboard for one photo. That’s it.” And she added her sideways smile.
While I look forward to that exciting occasion next weekend, I sifted through photos to find just the right one to pair with this tribute to Piper. Instead, I found a theme, a hundred photos that capture the essence of her. It is all the things—heavy, light, animal and human, physical and metaphorical—she carries:
(Click play on the slideshow below)
All The Things She Carries
—backpacks stuffed with books, projects, papers, art, clementine peels and Starburst wrappers
—sweet confections and homemade creations; the way she nurtures with food
—miracles of nature, from sparkling seaglass to newly hatched chicks to a freshly bathed crested Polish to the perfect fall leaf
—the doe-eyed adoration of every cat, dog, cousin and child that comes into her life
—the loyalty, admiration and confidences of her close friends and girlfriend
—tender, mended bones and heart; the scars a testament to her tenacity and grit
— a resolve that shyness was something she would outgrow and shed at sixteen, like her “winterskin” Marmot jacket
—a love for all things Harry Potter, a back-up glue gun, half-finished cups of her favorite teas, and our fireplace bed
—”Dave” her chalk bag, shoes, harness, gear bag, stick clip, daypack and crash pad
— a creative aesthetic that imagined a quilt with over 1000 pieces, endless bottle cap art in Utila and a wall of dozens of paper butterflies taking flight
—a fierce inner strength that has empowered her to overcome setbacks, illnesses, anxiety and injuries
—a loathing of the cold, cruelty to animals, meanness, immaturity, the patriarchy, close-mindedness and stupidity
—a passport stamped from Scandinavia to the Caribbean, and weeks of memories on the rock faces of the Southeastern gorges
—mutual lovefests and bantering rapport with her siblings and her pseudo-siblings, the big sisters from PDX who lived with us
—the constant companionship of Toast, her foster-fail bottle baby and Amelia, her latest midnight rescue
—a reconciliation of the ‘inexplicable sadness’ and the sensitive tenderness that makes her a deeply empathetic human
—a moral compass and fire for activism that can rock others back on their heels and makes us all a tiny bit afraid of her
—the welling gratitude of two parents so proud of all she has accomplished, excited to see what the next chapters bring
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As far as the photo in the cap and gown goes, we’re not that worried about it. We have a feeling there will be more graduations and major milestones in her future. After all, she’s already 1/4 of the way there.