On Friday, E put on some fancy/ridiculous academic regalia, headed to the lovely Beacon Theater on the Upper West Side, and marched across the stage to become an alumnus of the New York University School of Law. The streets were a sea of bright purple, and the graduates and their loved ones were all beaming with the pride that’s felt after 3 long, hard, exciting years of work are done.
Of course, the graduation ceremony — and all of the pomp and circumstance that came with it — was kind of an anticlimax. Today, E started his bar prep class, which he’ll be attending every weekday from now until the end of July, when he’s really done. But ritual is important, and so he was hooded by one of his professors on Friday afternoon, and his time as a student was formally concluded.
This time three years ago, E decided to come to NYU, and we began the long, slow process of packing up our lives in Boston and coming to New York. It’s been a tough three years for a lot of reasons. Law school is a sort of universally acknowledged Difficult Time for families, and trying to make a family when E’s been in the trenches of law school has been hard. But, come Friday afternoon, I thought back on three years of late nights and lost weekends, on all the work E has done and all the work I have done and all the work we’ve done together, and I was proud not only of him, but of us. If there’s one thing I’ve learned in the last few years, it’s that none of us gets where we are alone. E and I have used the last year to become a better team, and part of that teamwork included getting him across the finish line in regards to law school. I am so proud of him, and so excited to see what he does next. And I am proud of what we’ve worked to create together, and feeling more confident than I ever have before as we stand on the precipice of What’s Next.
We’ve got this.
Bravo, E. I’m your biggest fan. I don’t care what Frederick Douglass says.
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