Rites of passage

Over the course of our lives, all of us go through a series of what sociologists call rites of passage. These are ceremonies of one sort or another, some formal, some not, which indicate our moving from one stage of our lives to another, hopefully more advanced one.
One example of a rite of passage which almost everyone in our society experiences is a high school graduation commencement exercise. Even the name “commencement exercise” suggests that we are beginning something new when we leave high school, going from a childhood education to a more advanced level, either in college or some other school, including the school of hard knocks. This is one of the more formal rites we go through, with the music, the procession, the speeches, the caps and gowns and all the other trappings with which we are all so familiar.
The typical marriage ceremony is another example of a formal rite of passage. The general idea, either in a religious or civil ceremony, is that we are promising to be faithful to one other person, forsaking all others, and behave like a grown-up is expected to behave in our society, however much that has changed over time. Most of us experience this one sooner or later, and some of us live to regret it. I’ve never regretted it, but I know plenty of people who have.
Of more interest, to me at any rate, are the informal rites of passage that we may not even be aware of at the time; things like kissing a member of the opposite sex who isn’t related to you for the first time, or learning to ride a bicycle. These rites are many and varied. They’re not always the same for everybody and not everybody experiences the same ones. The one thing they have in common is that we are different afterwards. The rite of passage has changed us fundamentally and we are never quite the same again.
Getting our driver’s license is something most of us remember all our lives. Especially if we have children who come along and unintentionally remind us of how wrong we were about what we felt at the time. With that piece of plastic from the state came an enormous responsibility at a time in our lives when the vast majority of us had few responsibilities and didn’t want anything to do with them. That driver’s license set us free in a sense and the freedom was what we wanted. We had little or no interest in the consequences of being legally able to operate a large and potentially very dangerous machine. All we cared about was getting out and going alone in a car that we might not even have to pay for, or maintain. We just wanted to impress our friends and have a good time.
Give me the freedom, mom and dad. You keep the responsibility.
Like I said before, this new freedom changed us, forever, and not always for the better.
Last week, I experienced one of those fundamentally altering rites of passage. Along with my elder son, Chris, I helped move my younger son, Nathaniel, from an apartment in Jonesboro, where he had just graduated from ASU, to a new place in Memphis, where he begins classes in graduate school at the University of Memphis next week.
I’m not sure why this move was so different from any of the others we’ve made, like when he first left home to go to college at Webster University in St. Louis, or when he transferred to ASU at the start of his junior year. But, somehow, it was different for me. For some reason, I had a deep sense of loss, like my baby was really gone this time.
He had moved on; Mom and Dad weren’t going to be as important in his life anymore. He had taken on, completely of his own free will, an entirely new challenge. Maybe I should have felt that way when he graduated from college, but I didn’t. My wife and I had always insisted that he go to college, but graduate school was his idea.
When Nathaniel reads this and sees that I’ve referred to him as “my baby” I’ll probably have another sense of loss. He’ll probably come home and tear my head off.