As Rock Hill region seniors graduate, this parent reflects on an unforgettable ride

More than a dozen years ago, I walked a little boy in a buttoned-down shirt and blue jeans into his kindergarten classroom in Fort Mill. He had his matching Panthers bookbag and lunchbox. He had a neighbor friend in his new class, and his mother just down the hall in hers. Teachers smiled and hugged.

So many people asked him if he was ready. Nobody asked me.

Starting this month, more than 4,900 grown-up versions of kids just like him will take another walk. They’ll don caps and gowns of all colors, spread across three counties in the Rock Hill region. They’ll listen for their names. Then they’ll go, off toward work or school or basic training or social media stardom.

I’m far from the first parent to wonder how in the world we got here. Yet watching these sons and daughters of ours, I can’t help but feel that life fundamentally changed beneath our feet in this whisper of a time we’ve had together.

Born into the Great Recession, these kids survived the biggest toilet paper shortage in the history of mankind and the COVID pandemic it rode in on. The iPhone debuted the same year many of these seniors were born. They’re older than Instagram, Twitter and TikTok, all of which had them begging incessantly for those iPhones throughout middle school.

Politics aside, consider what else they’ve seen. This country elected a Black president — twice. Two women won major party nominations. One of the world’s most famous businessmen, a celebrity reality show host when these kids were born, ran three times for president and won twice.

Then we had the important matters.

The whole world stopped for a turn to debate whether a dress was blue or white. We froze like mannequins and dumped ice buckets over our heads. We had time for these viral sensations once Netflix let us binge-watch entire seasons of shows in a night, and Spotify put all our music at our fingertips.

Netflix, of course, is what we were told to sit home and watch for a week or two while a certain virus passed. COVID lasted much longer. These kids finished sixth grade in a virtual school setup area school districts invented over a weekend. Many kids spent half of middle school behind Chromebook screens or masks.

These kids of ours still feel that tech transformation. How many high school assignments did they have that were due at midnight? School boards worried they’d killed snow days. AI went from tinkerable video game setting to paper writing partner, to perhaps the greatest competition these seniors will face in the job market.

Even the schools set to host these upcoming graduations changed since our babies were born.

Catawba Ridge, Legion Collegiate, York Prep and Riverwalk Academy didn’t exist then. It’s plausible a Nation Ford graduate this year could’ve been born the day that school opened in 2007. The next year, when most current seniors were born, South Pointe graduated its first class. This year, Clover graduates its last one before splitting into two schools.

Parents got an education too

We changed, too. They won’t hand out diplomas for it, but parents learned plenty as we sent our kids to these schools.

We learned English. We got a full afternoon of conversation from our kindergartners on what paint color they used in art class, but with high schoolers we learned to communicate in as few words as possible.

We were lucky to get college acceptance, scholarship or other somewhat important info via emoji.

We learned history, mainly that being born in the 1900s makes us relics. We learned geography. We drove those kids through so many obscure little towns en route to travel ball tournaments, dance competitions, band auditions, Scout campouts or the thousand other activities that captivated them for a season.

And we learned math. Boy, did we learn math.

We counted everything from the breaths they took that first night home from the hospital to the ticking minutes on either side of curfew. We had to learn that sometimes our dreams for these crazy kids run parallel to theirs, and sometimes they intersect hard.

Now, it’s time to show how far we’ve come.

We stand back there, at that bustling kindergarten classroom door if only in our minds, and it’s time to let go. Sometimes the hardest lessons take the most practice. They will get through this, and we will too.

These past dozen years have proven we can navigate the happiest and heaviest moments — sometimes all at once.