A year without parenting milestones

As the 2017-18 academic year gets underway, my wife Terry and I find ourselves very much "in process" when it comes to being the parents of five children.

What I mean is, we've got kids going every which direction, but no one is graduating or necessarily reaching any sort of academic or vocational landmark in the coming year. Yes, one kid is starting college, but compared with graduation, that's a relatively tame thing, if only because we've been through it before at different levels.

We stand thusly in the Tennant household as summer 2017 wanes and the first signs of autumn make themselves evident:

Elissa

My 23-year-old eldest child has earned her bachelor's degree in marketing from Cleveland State University. She works for a great little strategic branding agency called Hey Now! Media as a digital strategist/social media manager. That's a very Millennial job title, and come to think of it, that exclamation point in the name of the agency is pretty darn Millennial, too. Elissa has officially moved out, though she lives only 5 minutes or so away in a rented house with one of her longtime friends.

She is, by almost any standard you care to name, an adult. I'm good with this, but I'm also not. She was ready to be on her own and all, but I miss having her around. I will always miss having her around. That's the way this game is played. (And hey, you can see my pretty little girl here and read her very professional sounding bio while you're at it.)

Chloe

Little Chloe is nearly 21 years old, which makes me think I probably shouldn't refer to her as "Little Chloe" so much anymore. She is a junior biomedical engineering major at the University of Akron who has designs on attending medical school and becoming some sort of doctor, possibly a pediatrician (though she also talks on occasion about becoming an eye doc...I think she would be good at either). She is at the point of her engineering studies where everything gets pretty intense and serious, and as a result she is no longer a member of the Akron marching band, which is sad but also necessary. Engineering students, I'm told, regularly drop out of band at Akron once they hit that third year. She is in the process of moving into a just-off-campus apartment as I type, and will be officially gone as of Sunday evening. She's a hard worker, that one is.

Jared

The Boy begins his college career next week as a freshman at THE Cleveland State University. OK, CSU doesn't use the "THE" like Ohio State does, but it just sounded good so I went with it. Anyway, I've only seen him for short stretches throughout this summer because he spends a lot of time working at the Cleveland Indians team shop. And hanging out with his girlfriend. This is what happens when you have an 18-year-old son. By all accounts, though, he's ready to start this college thing and plow ahead with his intended major in business administration. I have no idea what he's going to do with his life, and maybe he doesn't, either, which is just fine. I never understand why we push 18-year-old kids to make decisions that could affect the course of their professional lives for the next three or four decades. Jared will find his way. He always does. Let's give him a few years to sort things out.

Melanie

Mel grew up suddenly – jarringly even – in the last couple of years. She's a junior at Wickliffe High School, a class officer, a soccer player, and so far a straight-A student. This year she is spending half of each school day out at Mentor High School taking a few general classes and participating in Mentor's business/marketing program, then the second half of the day back at Wickliffe. I can't keep up with her. Next thing I know, she'll be graduating. I would rather not talk about it, but between you and me, I'm super impressed with this one.

Jack

Ah, Jackie. My Other Boy. My 11-year-old, thin-as-a-rail, cross country-running, class clown. Yes, apparently he's the class clown, at least according to his seventh-grade math teacher Danna Huested. I've known Danna since 1975, when we both started kindergarten at the old Mapledale Elementary School, and she is among the best teachers my kids have had. So I found it part amusing and part alarming when I attended middle school open house the other day, and with a smile she said to me, "So you saved the class clown for your last kid? He doesn't fit the (Tennant) mold!" A month or so earlier, Jack's cross country coach (another Wickliffe classmate, the awesome Todd Calic) said something similar: "Everyone on the team loves him. He cracks everybody up."

And it all makes sense to me. Jack is the youngest of five kids, which in itself means he has always had to work to carve out his own identity in the chaos of our house. But when you consider that he skipped a grade back in elementary school, it gets even tougher for him. He's an 11-year-old in a class full of 12- and soon-to-be-13-year-olds. This is a funny age to begin with, and being the youngest one in the class has to make it even trickier. So Jack copes by being the funny guy. I'm OK with that as long as he doesn't become disruptive in class or during team cross country activities. And I think he knows that. He's doing fine, but I'll admit I worry about him a lot.


So anyway, that's where things stand for us. We're just going about the business of living life and continuing to raise a family. With each passing year, thoughts of what happens once we reach The Other Side (i.e., the empty nest) creep into my head, but they're no more than thoughts. We still have a long way to go, with plenty of homework, school projects, sports practices and games, band concerts, and yes, graduations and big milestones to go.

For now, that's good enough. Exhausting, but good enough.

No offense, but you most likely have no idea what you're talking about

I'm not a confrontational person, so I don't especially enjoy arguments or online debates. You will understand, then, how much it pains me to have to tell you that you are clueless when it comes to the major issues facing the world today.

You will also understand that I'm right there with you. I fully count myself among the clueless. I'm not saying I have the right answers and you don't. I'm saying that together, we barely understand the questions let alone the answers.

When it comes to almost any issue on which people are likely to take a stand these days – things like Charlottesville, global warming, North Korea, immigration, any random thing tweeted out by President Trump, etc. – I frankly do not trust your judgment, nor should you trust mine.

The reason is that all of these are stunningly complex problems, and unless you are:

(a) a trained expert with access to and understanding of the relevant information needed to form an intelligent opinion, and

(b) someone who does not take a knee-jerk position to the political right or left

...then I have no choice but to discount your take. And since I know virtually no one who fits both point (a) and point (b), I'm forced to conclude that you're full of poop. I actually hate the word "poop," but this is ostensibly a family blog and I'm not about to drop even a relatively mild S-bomb here.

Take global warming, for instance. You can certainly correct me if I'm wrong (I don't think I am, but again, what do I know?), but climatology is an immensely complex science, is it not? Concomitantly, global warming theory is also very complex and nuanced. Yet every time it's cold in August, some uninformed jack-wad is on Twitter with his "Hey, so much for global warming, huh snowflakes??" take.

There is no need to point out to this person that nothing in the concept of global warming precludes a cold day – or a long stretch of cold days – in what is normally a relatively warm time of the year. They have "won" because something happened that seems to support their supremely uninformed and simplistic opinion on a given topic, and any "facts" that get in their way have been made up by the biased liberal media or are being propagated by right-wing corporate fascists.

This is not intelligent debate. This is a bunch of monkeys with keyboards typing about random things of which they have little to no understanding.

And these same monkeys are called upon to evaluate the opinions of political candidates and vote for the ones they believe are right.

Yet they have virtually no idea what "right" is or how to get there. They (we) are unfairly expected to have a big-picture view of questions and problems that go far beyond anything they (we) are trained to analyze and understand.

Now, having said all of that, I do realize the seemingly inevitable conclusion of this line of thinking: That there's no need to have an opinion on anything, that we should trust our fate to a small handful of experts on each issue, that we should just stick to playing online poker on our phones and watching "Game of Thrones" and let the really, really smart people decide everything for us.

And I have no counterargument to that. That's terrifying to me and it's not at all what I want, yet I still feel strongly that very, very few of us are equipped to rationally and thoroughly pass judgment on the big issues of the day. We just aren't. We can gain some small understanding, but we don't have enough context, knowledge or training to be able to say definitively what course society should take on any given important question.

This, by the way, is why I'm supremely comforted by my belief in the God of the Bible. I am convinced there will be a "happy ending" to all of this, but I'm also aware that I live in a country in which people are free to believe that or not. You are permitted to make fun of me for putting my faith in "sky fairies" or whatever, and I'm free to ignore you because, as I've said, you don't have any more idea than I do what you're talking about.

I need to stop talking now, especially since you've come this far and have realized I have no firm advice for you. This is, I think, an unsolvable question. You either shut down and let yourself be guided by politicians and power brokers, or you take a strong stand on everything, knowing you ultimately lack the capacity to fully understand the question thoroughly or to appreciate opposing viewpoints in an objective way.

Life's crazy, isn't it?

I wish school didn't start so early, but I get why it does

At the risk of turning this into a "BACK IN MY DAY" old man rant, I will point out that my youngest two children go back to school tomorrow, which is a full three weeks earlier than they would have returned using the system under which I grew up.

That system – also known as "The Right System" – dictated that school didn't start until right after Labor Day. Which meant that the month of August was entirely devoted to summer vacation unless you were a fall sport athlete who had practices in August. And that was perfectly fine.

Then, round about the time I was in high school in the mid- to late 80s, they pushed the start of school back into August. It was late August, mind you, but still...August. That took some getting used to.

And now it seems every year they just keep messing with us. More for their own amusement than anything else, they keep seeing how far they can move up that first day of school before someone starts to notice. This year, Day #1 is August 15th, which as far as I can tell is the earliest the school year has ever kicked off in Wickliffe.

I will readily note that school has started in early August in Florida and other southern states for years. That's what they're used to, so they don't count in this discussion.

We in the Midwest lived for decades under an academic calendar that didn't commence until the Labor Day picnics were over, and that always seemed like a good way to go at it. At least to me. Labor Day was your last hurrah. As I recall, it was the last weekend during which the city pools were open. Or at least the last weekend they were open under summer hours.

You would watch the Jerry Lewis telethon on Labor Day and then you would go back to school the very next day, or maybe on Wednesday of that week. We were all good with it.

Of course, having said all of this, I realize school districts are subject to forces they can't necessarily control in making this decision, chiefly the state testing schedule that requires you (or at least makes it a very, very good idea) to have a certain number of instructional hours before the dreaded tests begin. The earlier you start, the longer you have to work with the kids before they take the tests, which go a long way toward determining your district's grade on state report cards, teacher and administration performance reviews, funding, etc.

Plus, at the high school level, an earlier start allows a clean break between the first and second semesters. You can finish off first-semester exams before the kids go off for their holiday break, and then start fresh with second-semester classes and material in January.

On the other hand, we somehow for years managed the not-quite-so-clean process of January review and exams at Wickliffe, and I'm guessing we could somehow get through it again if a calendar switch would force us into it.

I always think twice before I criticize school board members and administrators, because I frankly find that most of the people who do that do it out of ignorance. I would like some of them to spend a day in those jobs before they spout off. That's not to say people in those positions are beyond criticism. Not at all. But having the facts in hand first is probably advisable.

In any case, like so many things in life, this whole start-of-school question comes down to this: I wish it wasn't this way, but I get why it is. Things change. Life goes on. You can all get off my lawn anyway.