Transition Time

It's melancholy Monday, folks, after Saturday's graduation from high school of my youngest child. I guess I didn't know what to expect, emotionally, from this momentous occasion. When my daughter graduated three years ago, I didn't feel sad, I felt happy and proud and eager to help her on her adulthood journey. But this time, while I feel those things, they're tempered by a real sense of sadness. While I am thrilled I don't have to pay Catholic school tuition anymore, it's also jarring to realize you won't have the same relationship with the teachers and administrators as before. It's truly the end of an era.
Now, I am a stepmother, and have three at home still to see through this process, though I'm not really looking forward to those transitions either.
All I can do these next few days, weeks, months and years, is hope that my son makes the "right" choices--about a major, about friends, about drinking (it is college), about everything. While he will be living at home the first year of his community college career, that, too, will end, and I'll probably be as much of an emotional wreck when it happens.
Thank goodness for my supportive husband, my network of friends and family, my athletic "career"--if I didn't have those, I would truly be lost.
Like all grieving processes--and that's what this end of an era is--this will take time and I'll heal. That is, until my daughter graduates from college next year!