Sam graduated from high school yesterday. This marks a significant milestone not only in his life, but in mine too. More precisely, my relationship with him. I met Sam a little over four years ago, just as we was about to graduate from middle school. He was finishing one phase of his life and moving on to something new. For me, being able to share with him his high school years was my opportunity to experience one complete, full cycle of his life.

As a step mom, you get thrown into the middle of things.  Kind of like coming into the theatre during the second act after the overture has played, the characters have all been introduced and you have to read the synopsis in the program to catch up and figure out what the heck is going on.  It is very hard to jump right in there into the present, when you have not lived through the past. I never got to watch Sam play little league, never saw his class plays and  never pretended to be the  tooth fairy.

But high school was different because I was there from the beginning. I heard all about the classes he was taking, met all of his friends,  gave him rides to the mall so he could trade in his video games, played hostess at his birthday parties and watched over him like a hawk to make sure he was staying out of trouble.

The last part was a bit of a struggle because Sam did not take to high school the way we expected him to. He is an extremely bright boy who was simply bored to death in school. He was unchallenged and unmotivated. Still…  he went to school, didn’t cut classes and managed to fulfill all the requirements to graduate. Last week he surprised me when he asked if he could have money to buy a yearbook. He had never wanted one before. I assumed because  he did not want any memories of what he considered to me his miserable high school experience. I met him at school to give him the money and he was so happy he actually kissed me and told me he loved me. When he came home that day we sat on the couch together and he showed me all of the pictures of him that were in the book.  He was on the Halloween page wearing the Ghostbusters costume I had bought for him. We laughed at the funny cereal club photo that was a staged reenactment of  Da Vinci’s last supper. (He was Judas.) He showed me his teachers’ photos, his friends,  and shots of him in various classes. He looked happy. He was having a good time. Maybe high school wasn’t so bad after all. I was so grateful that he not only shared his memories with me, but that I had also been a part of them.

Sam will be going to community college in the fall. As he embarks on this next phase of his life I feel like I have been instrumental in helping him get there. It may be the third act, but I’m all caught up and I know what’s going on.