Hidden Gems

In the four years our daughter navigated university life in Boston and a course load I could barely pronounce, let alone wrap my head around, I had spent about a month of days trying to navigate its streets.

I spent many mornings piecing small runs through the parks that connect the city’s famed Emerald Necklace. Often getting lost, alternately confused by construction and the city’s natural complexity. 

While we visited during family weekends, we tried to be available but unobtrusive. It is natural, even if painfully so, that our very presence elicits conflicting aspects of wary and welcome. 

The first time we visited, she took advantage of the safe-haven familiarity offered in our hotel suite. This time, it was clear she was home in the world. All along, she had to push against our pull. 

A tightrope walk, for sure, but also, in truth, a feat of spectacular proportion.

We are constantly reminded of that delicate balance as we sit as guests waiting for the pomp and circumstance to begin. 

Speeches are filled with commendations about the graduates’ drive and resilience. Speakers gave generous praise to the parents who helped make it all possible. We are reminded about their fortitude in the face of struggle. How success and failure are intertwined. And how experience is at the heart of all education, which, ideally, is never-ending. 

It is our story, as parents, too.

We made small talk with the parents around us in a line that stretched around the block, past a celebrity burger joint she never tried, and the bullseye department store she mused was always cleaned out of stock by the density of college-aged consumers it triangulated. 

I got unexpectedly emotional as we shuffled slowly past. Camera in hand, but in an ocean of people … Like I had missed a silly photo opportunity to come full circle. “We should have come here … I had forgotten we were in Target when she got her acceptance letter!”

“Yesterday, we did a photo shoot at Dunkin’s,” said the lady next to me, and the line reverberated with stories of following their cap and gowned grads into their favorite bodegas and random spots on and off campus. 

We had followed our daughter through a fancy shopping center, down an escalator into an underground burrow where she had found her own hidden gem - a little closet where a cobbler offered instant shoe repair. It was a tiny moment that felt momentous.

As we file into the storied stadium and sit in seats we’d envy during a ballgame, the bigness of all hits me in a way that it hadn’t during two other ceremonies we’d already attended in as many days.

We all experience moments like this, and we interpret them in different ways. Sometimes we marvel, and sometimes we take for granted. We often experience excitement with anxiety. We even filter out the shine and focus on the little spots of tarnish. 

We may even look back and see something we missed the first time. Hidden in plain sight. Hope.