Family Snapshot Comes to Bittersweet Ending

by John Ettorre

Ever since our two sons first began attending school, our family has had a custom of taking their photo on the first day back to school each fall.

In the early years, when they were young and playful, it tended to be outside on the front stoop, where they would ham it up for the camera. One year they even lovingly embraced each other in a brotherly hug. To this day, it remains my favorite photo of the two of them. More recently, as they entered the sullen teen years, the photo shoot moved indoors, where they would tend to stand mute and slack-jawed, rolling their eyes as mom asked them to sit still for just one more shot. Sometimes they would be bent over under the weight of their giant backpacks, but always their faces betrayed a world-weary disgust for this tiresome familial obligation. You know how that goes. Even if you don’t have teens yourself, you’ve likely observed their odd rituals at the mall.

When you’re mired in those heavy-duty years, older parents will knowingly tell you how fast it all goes by, how you should enjoy it while you can, because you’ll blink and it’ll all be over. You smile and nod, but deep down in the recesses of your parental heart, you don’t really believe any of it. The truth is, sometimes your real concern is that it might never end, this treadmill existence of work and parenting, seemingly in perpetuity.

Well, it does end. They were right after all, those older parents. And yes, it happens sooner than you could have thought possible.

A few weeks ago, we snapped what’s likely to be the last such first-day-of-school photo of our two boys, born just 16 months apart. Our oldest is now in his senior year in high school, and next year things will change. Who knows: we may well continue the family custom by taking a photo on the first day of college. But how? Should it be on the day we leave home to drop him off, on the day we leave school to return home? Or should we just hire a photographer to snap the picture on the actual morning when he begins classes the first time, since we won’t be around? In any event, the upshot is that the custom as we have known it has come to an end.

Thinking about that traditional first-day photo made me recall another nice family custom. During their grade-school and middle-school careers, when they rode a bus to school each morning, my wife and I would walk them two hundred yards from home to the corner where they caught the bus. In later years, I got lazy, sometimes making the walk, sometimes not, though my wife always did. Still, for about six or seven years of what I’ve come to recall as a golden time, that family routine was among my favorite parts of the day, a time when we were at our best, a time when they might do or say anything. And when we were always there to watch and listen.

For parents, it’s easy to think that the most memorable moments of their kids’ childhoods will happen on cue, say, at birthday parties or on family trips. These can indeed be occasions for memorable moments. But I think the warmest family memories tend to arise out of the smaller rituals like the daily walk to the school bus. They tend to yield quieter dramas that slowly unfold over time. I can’t say that in all those years of walking to the bus stop I can recall any particular conversation we had. But what I do recall vividly is the warmth we all felt just by being together as we began our day.

Don’t get me wrong—like most sentient parents coming to the end of the first phase of their lifelong parental careers, I have a boatload of regrets about parenthood. At times, a little film will replay in my head, full of all the inevitable woulda, shoulda, couldas that go along with any experience, but which seem to arise with special intensity when it comes to crucial life tasks such as parenthood. I think about all the things I might have done better, or at least differently, if I had a second crack at it.

But of course we don’t have the option of living life backward; it marches relentlessly forward, mocking whatever regrets we might have about the past.

And besides, if I ever feel myself getting discouraged about the might-have-beens and the should-have-dones of parenthood, I can just march over to that photo of those two young rascals on our front stoop, their bodies contorted in a loving long-ago embrace, their eyes ablaze with youthful delight. And I remind myself that in the end, things worked out pretty well.

John Ettorre is a Cleveland-based writer and editor whose writing has appeared in more than 70 publications. To reach John, send e-mail to: jettorre@voyager.net or call him at (216) 382-6548.