June is a good month for travel. Most places are not yet too hot, yet the weather is reliably warm (usually). As I searched for a topic for today’s post, I came across photographs of a couple of trips my husband and I took in past Junes.
2007 and 2008 weren’t too long ago in our life spans, but as I reviewed the pictures, I realized how long ago these years were in our children’s lives. They were legally adults. But in June 2007 when we visited her, our daughter had just graduated from college and was rowing for the last time as a collegiate. In June 2008, our son was working in his second (or maybe third) job after college, but this was his first job in which he began pivoting toward the content marketing field in which he has specialized. And he has had many more jobs since then.
June 2007 found my husband and me traveling to Camden, New Jersey, near Philadelphia, to watch our daughter’s crew team compete in the IRA National Championship. She was a lightweight rower, and lightweight women’s rowing was not an NCAA sport. So Intercollegiate Rowing Association provided the championship event instead.
In her junior year, our daughter’s team took the silver medal. Unfortunately, in 2007, when she was a senior, they made the final heat, but did not medal. It was a difficult end to her collegiate career.
I am thankful that she has continued to row as a master, and her master’s team often does very well in competitions. We’ve traveled to Seattle and San Diego to watch her row in regattas as a master.
We returned to the East Coast in June 2008 to visit our son, newly moved from Washington, D.C., to Brooklyn, New York. He lived in a sad apartment above a pizza parlor. As parents, we were not impressed with his living conditions. He has spent his post-college years moving between Chicago, D.C., and New York, and it took a few more moves past the 2008 apartment for him to land in a place we could appreciate. For the past few years, he has been on his second stint living in Brooklyn, and he and his wife are now buying a house there. So I guess he is likely to stay put.
Both children have landed on their feet and are self-supporting and responsible. But this review of past trips in June has allowed me to remember some of their early struggles. Through these years, my husband and I have tried to show support without nagging or offering too much advice. I hope they think we did all right. We certainly think they’ve done all right.
What do you remember about your children’s adulting years?
You’ve done well, as have they! Great job!