A secondhand milestone

We seem to mark our lives by the milestones we reach and surpass. The major ones, in my book, are high school graduation, college graduation, marriage, and the births of your children. I happen to have surpassed all of these milestones. Still ahead lie the big anniversaries, retirement (if it ever happens), dotage, and death.

I suppose we could also see the process of our children reaching these milestones in personal terms, too. For instance, it will certainly be a personal milestone for me to give away my daughters to other men. And when my children bring home their first children, I'll be rejoicing in my first grandchildren. I'll call these secondhand milestones.

I experienced something of a secondhand milestone this past week. My oldest son earned his driver's license. Now, it seems wrong to rank the experience of getting one's driver's license on a par with graduations, marriages, and births. But I would be wrong to minimize how important this is to a guy in America. We literally look forward to receiving that license for years before the big day arrives. I did, and so did my son. My second son is still in the anticipation stage.

So there I stood as my son climbed into the car with the DMV tester. I've watched him in various solo endeavors before, but nothing yet had so driven home to me the truth that he is leaving the nest, that his mom and I are working ourselves out of a job. I could do nothing to help him except pray. He was on his own. (Of course, this particular event was superceded later in the day when he actually backed out of the driveway and drove off alone, without even a DMV tester on board. Then he was really on his own.)

In 18 months or so, he'll reach one of those real milestones--high school graduation. And while he's experiencing it firsthand, I'll be somewhere nearby, going through it with him, secondhand.

GtG