Anatomy of a Writer: Graduation

This past weekend, my youngest sibling graduated from high school.

To most, this might not seem like a big deal, but Tyler's graduation affected me in a big way. First of all, there's a big age difference between the oldest and youngest in my family. There are three of us - there's an eleven-year difference between Brandon and Tyler and an eight-year difference between Tyler and I. That means when Brandon graduated from high school, Tyler was seven years old. When I graduated from high school, Tyler was ten years old. Tyler has always been the baby of the family and his graduation and transition into adulthood seemed so far off that I never really thought about it.

But he is now a high school graduate. This whole thing has definitely made me feel older. It has made me miss the times when Tyler was young and I would take care of him. It has made me realize how fast the time really goes.

From the moment Tyler was born, I felt very protective of him. I was in second grade and he was a small baby who I thought needed my constant love and attention. I loved helping my mom take care of him by feeding him and playing with him. Tyler and I spent a lot of time together. He was my best friend.

When Brandon went off to college at Purdue in the fall of 2004, Tyler was seven and I was fifteen. My mom went back to work and my dad was a pilot, working days when he wasn't traveling. During the summers, it was just Tyler and I. I would take him everywhere - to skateboard and play tennis with my friends, to K-Mart to get those addicting Coke slushies, out on the lake with my best friend on her dad's boat, to the free movie days at the local movie theatre. I didn't care that he was always around since our parents worked. I loved having him around and my friends loved him too, especially my best friend, Cohen (who also had two brothers that were much younger than her).

We had lots of time to spend together, so I often got creative with finding fun things for us to do. Some days we were like siblings and would fight, other days I was like his parent when he would need an attitude adjustment, and other days he was my best friend when we would just spend time together. I was always asking myself, what can I teach him? How can I prepare him for the future? I started volunteering in the Sunday school room at church, taking Tyler with me every Sunday morning (even though it was a battle trying to get him out of bed that early). We read the Bible together. We stayed up late talking and deciding what we were going to do the next day.

So like I said, Tyler's high school graduation has really affected me. Sure, his graduation has definitely made me feel older. But more than anything, I'm trying to grapple with the fact that the baby I thought of as my own is now a man with a girlfriend and a driver's license and a college scholarship to play baseball. Time goes so fast, but I am so proud of the young man he has become.