Matching Tracksuits

Every year, we have at least one final-time experience without even knowing it. A new calendar year turns over, and we never realize that at some point during that previous year, it was the last time we would hold our child, talk to our mother, work at a given job. Sometimes, we know it’s our last time. When I said goodbye to my students at the end of last year, I knew it was the last time I’d do that at Hughes. Occasionally, we’re wrong: we think it’s the final time, but it’s not. Such was leaving Poland in 1999.

Usually, though, we have no idea we’re experiencing a final moment as we live it: we don’t realize it’s a last-time. I walked out of our house to photograph an ordination, offering my mother a casual “See you,” without realizing it was the last time I would talk to her. I don’t even remember my final conversation with my father-in-law.

Last year was possibly the last time our whole family will be together during Easter. I doubt it: I think we’ll end up together many more times, but it’s possible that 2025 was our final Easter together. Since Thanksgiving and Christmas always provide more time off, those are the likely family holidays within which we’ll create reunion traditions. Yet as our ideas grow up, move out, and create lives of their own, they’ll likely share those lives with someone, and that will result in split familial obligations. We celebrated Thanksgiving with my mother’s family one year and my father’s the next because of this. (Christmas and Easter didn’t even come into the picture as they were pagan traditions no true Christian would celebrate.) Something like that will likely setting into place in our family, but Easter will often be that outlier, I suspect. L and her partner might be with us one year while E and his partner are visiting her family. Who knows?

What I do know and noticed immediately this weekend is how different our Easter was this year compared to others. Most significantly, the Girl was not with us. Her club volleyball team had a tournament in Kansas City, so she was not with us. The Boy got a gig playing in a small orchestra for a Baptist Church’s Easter service, and we had to leave Sunday morning at 6:30 to make it on time. So we didn’t go to a regular family Easter service together either. (Of course, it’s not missing the service that bothers me: it’s the change in tradition.) In the early evening, most of the usual guests had arrived. But there were not enough kids even to attempt an Easter egg hunt. Young T brought her infant son (so we teased Ciocia M about being Babcia M now), but he’s the closest to being of an age that even has an interest in the Easter egg hunt. And everyone left well before eight. An atypical Easter in every sense.

It got me thinking about the transition we’re in: L’s a legal adult now starting to make a life of her own. The Boy will begin high school in a matter of months, and those four years will simply melt. Everything will be in flux as they figure out in their early adulthood what exactly they’re going to make of their lives. I didn’t figure all of that out until I was nearly thirty, so it could be a long period of fluctuation and change. But one thing is for sure: with both kids, we’ve left childhood behind long ago.