By David Trinko
The Lima News
You might think it gets easier by the time your second child goes through her final year of high school.
You might be wrong.
Our 17-year-old daughter enters her senior year this week. Everything’s new and exciting for her as she marks one last time for all her high school checkpoints.
In theory, we should already know how this all goes. After all, her older sister graduated from the same school in 2020.
Yet not a week goes by where I don’t ask my wife, “Is that new?”
It turns out that while our oldest might not have partaken of every senior year experience, this year’s senior will.
It’s a healthy reminder of how different each child is. The oldest was a bit of a homebody. She had her friends, and they hung out occasionally. For the most part, though, it didn’t matter that much to her to be a part of everything.
In comparison, her sister is class president, something that continues to flabbergast me since we’re not originally from here in a place where that often matters. She loves hanging out with her friends, while properly balancing it between schoolwork, sports and her two part-time jobs. She feels the weight of making every memory perfect, even if it’s not personally interesting to her.
That’s why she and my wife had to get a bunch of paint so the class could decorate jeans to wear to games.
That’s why she loaded folding tables into the back of the car, so they could celebrate their “senior sunset” together days before the start of classes.
That’s why my wife agreed to take silly pictures of the players on the girls’ golf team, so they can have signs hanging on their lockers like the other sports teams in their school. (I can’t wait to hear the feedback on her picture, holding a pair of golf balls in front of her face to make them look like googly eyes.)
I don’t remember any of these things affecting our now-graduated eldest daughter.
I don’t even remember thinking about these things 30 years ago, when I was a senior and the class president at my admittedly much smaller school. (Shout out to the AHS Class of 1994! Sorry I didn’t plan a reunion this year… or five years ago.)
I remember the stresses of college visits, application packets and asking people to write you recommendation letters. The rest of it just seemed easier to me, but that’s probably because an alert group of female classmates made scrapbooks for all of the football players. I believe I still have mine, probably on a bookshelf in the basement.
That goes to show that, for at least 30 years, kind-hearted, well-natured high school girls have been carefully planning to make sure everyone enjoys their senior years.
I’m glad there are people like those classmates, as well as people like my senior daughter, making sure all those special moments and projects happen for everyone, even if our oldest daughter didn’t take part in them where we’d have had a head’s up on what to expect next.
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See past columns by David Trinko at LimaOhio.com/tag/trinko.
David Trinko is editor of The Lima News. Reach him at 567-242-0467, by email at [email protected] or on Twitter @Lima_Trinko.
