I’m sitting in a hotel room.

The festivities start in a few hours. The cap and gown are somewhere in his house. The whole family is here — or close enough to here that the group text has been going since 7am and someone has already sent a photo of their breakfast like we needed that information right now.

And I am just — sitting here.

Taking it all in.

Because our littlest Schmidt is graduating from college this weekend.

— — —

Eleven years ago our oldest left for college.

Eleven years.

I want you to sit with that number for a second because I certainly am.

Eleven years ago I was a completely different version of myself — more energy, fewer opinions about my bedtime, absolutely zero understanding of what the words lumbar support meant or why anyone would care about them.

Eleven years ago I cried in a parking lot after dropping our firstborn off at a dorm room approximately the size of a generous closet and drove home in a silence so loud I could hear my own heartbeat.

And now here I am.

Same parking lots. Different campus. Same heartbeat.

And somehow — somehow — I am the parent of a college graduate. Our youngest is graduating from college.

How. Is that. Possible.

I’m going to need someone to explain the math to me because I was just thirty-five like a minute ago and now I am sitting in a hotel room wondering when exactly time decided to just completely stop asking my permission before moving forward.

— — —

Here’s what nobody tells you about the last one graduating.

With the first one — you’re devastated and proud in roughly equal measure and the devastation is loud and the pride is right there with it and you feel every single thing at full volume.

With the last one — it’s different.

It’s quieter somehow. More layered. Like the feelings have had eleven years to get more complicated and more tender and more aware of themselves.

I’m not just watching him graduate this weekend.

I’m watching the end of an era.

The era of school calendars organizing our lives. Of parent-teacher conferences and tuition payments and the particular kind of Sunday night dread that comes from knowing your child has a 7am class and absolutely no intention of going to sleep at a reasonable hour.

That era — the one that started when our oldest took her first steps into a kindergarten classroom and somehow never fully stopped — is closing today.

And I don’t want to rush past that.

I want to feel it.

Both things at once — the grief and the celebration, the ache and the pride — all tangled together the way the best moments always are.

Because here’s what I’ve learned about transitions after all these years of living through them:

You’re allowed to grieve something and celebrate it at the exact same time.

You don’t have to choose. You don’t have to perform one feeling while quietly hiding the other. You don’t have to be completely okay or completely falling apart.

You can be both.

That’s not confusion. That’s just what love feels like when it has to let something go.

— — —

Now. Can we talk about his room for a second. Since Right-Sizing is the name of the game in my life.

Our youngest is moving to New York City after graduation. A tiny apartment with friends. The kind of apartment where the square footage is more of a suggestion than a reality and everyone’s stuff is everyone’s stuff and the kitchen is also the living room is also somehow the hallway.

I know this apartment. I have visited this apartment in my imagination many times. It is delightful and chaotic and exactly right for twenty-two.

And because I am who I am — because I have spent the last several years rightsizing my own life and writing an entire book about the courage to clear what no longer fits — I have of course been gently, lovingly, possibly slightly aggressively helping him think through what goes to New York and what does not.

Does this support the life you’re living right now?

He has heard this question approximately forty-seven times in the past week.

He is handling it with remarkable patience for someone who is also trying to graduate from college and figure out his entire future simultaneously.

But here’s the thing — and I mean this — the Fearless Edit at twenty-two is a gift. Learning early that you don’t need to carry everything forward to prove your life has been full? That the memories are in you, not in the stuff? That a small intentional space can hold an enormous life?

That’s not deprivation.

That’s architecture.

Start right, littlest Schmidt. Start intentional. Your future self will thank you.

(He is rolling his eyes at me right now from across campus. I can feel it.)

— — —

And while we’re at it — can we establish some graduation weekend ground rules? Specifically for the parents in the room.

There is one question we absolutely cannot ask his friends this weekend.

We all know the question.

We’re all thinking the question.

And we are going to keep it inside our bodies where it belongs.

So — do you have a job lined up?

No.

We are not asking that.

We are smiling. We are congratulating. We are saying things like you must be so excited and this is such a wonderful day and we are letting these twenty-two year olds have their moment without the weight of our collective anxiety about their employment status landing on their graduation caps.

They will figure it out.

They always figure it out.

Our job today is celebration — not interrogation.

(I am also not asking about his salary, his five-year plan, or whether he has a Roth IRA yet. Those conversations exist. Today is not their day.)

— — —

Here’s what I know about this moment — sitting in this hotel room, a few hours before everything begins:

The energy I had eleven years ago when we dropped our oldest off at college?

Gone.

Completely, thoroughly, unapologetically gone.

I have traded that energy for something better — for the particular calm that comes from having done this before. From knowing that the letting go, as hard as it is, is not the end of anything. It’s the beginning of everything. For them and for us.

I know now what I didn’t know eleven years ago standing in that parking lot crying:

The relationship doesn’t shrink when they leave. It grows.

It grows into something different and more honest and more equal. Into phone calls that happen because they want to happen. Into the particular joy of watching someone you made become exactly who they were always going to be.

Our littlest Schmidt is graduating this weekend.

He’s moving to New York City with a tiny apartment and a carefully edited collection of belongings (you’re welcome) and a whole life in front of him that I cannot wait to watch him build.

And I am sitting in this hotel room — not quite the same person I was eleven years ago, thank God — feeling every single thing.

The pride. The grief. The gratitude. The disbelief that time moves this fast and the absolute certainty that it was all — every single moment of it — worth it.

— — —

If you are in this season too — watching your last one cross a finish line, feeling the particular bittersweet weight of a chapter closing — I want you to know something.

You did it.

All those years of showing up. Of figuring it out. Of being their person through every version of who they were becoming.

You did it.

Grieve it if you need to.

Celebrate it as loudly as you want to.

And then — when the cap has been tossed and the photos have been taken and the dinner has been eaten and the hotel room is finally quiet —

Sit in the feeling.

Don’t rush past it.

This is the moment.

You are actually here for it.

That is the right-sized life.

🤍

— Amy, writing from the hotel room before everything begins

If this resonated — forward it to the parent who is sitting in their own hotel room today, feeling all of it at once. They need to know they’re not alone. 🤍

Go forth and live yours. 🤍

XO, Amy