The Passage of Childhood (ft. Layla Paventi)
"It’s kind of slowly started to leave, but now it’s like, tomorrow I'm not gonna be a kid anymore."
“Who knows what time the bus is going to come,” she said. “I’m going to head out to the bus stop and wait.”
The screen door opened, snapped shut and that was that; our 14-year-old stepped into life as a high schooler.1
Parents will deflect the emotion of the moment and tell you that time flew. It was just the other day that they started kindergarten they will tell you, all the while facing some hard facts:
They’re getting older than they want to admit.
They’re child(ren) is getting older than they want to admit.
The drumbeat of time is carrying them forward to some inevitable milestones (for them and their child) that can be seen in the distance but that they don’t really want to discuss.
I mean, I’m not supposed to be 47 years old, right? My oldest daughter is not supposed to be 14. She’s supposed to be running around the backyard with our next door neighbor’s kids at our old house while the parents, still in our 30s, stand off to the side and sip beers.
My mortality, though, was confirmed Wednesday morning as I laid on the couch and listened to the diesel engine of her bus chug down the street to her first day of school.
Her first day of high school.
(Only 719 instructional days until she’s done with high school. Fuck.)
Teresa Pavlacka…
In retrospect, Teresa Pavlacka plays a much larger role in my high school story than I expected. We met on the first day of our freshman year and became inextricably linked for our Liverpool High School careers. In a world where order is through descending letters of the alphabet, Teresa would forever be seated either to my right or behind me. PAVE precedes PAVL, and she spent a fair amount of time looking at the back of my enormous head in homeroom and our shared classes.
Freshman year is a blurry mess of memories, as is much of high school, thanks to age and intentional repression2. I remember it being a chance to press a reset button and shed the labels of middle school, and establish myself amongst the mixing bowl of 600 or so students from three different middle schools. My daughter’s class is at least all going into the high school together; our school district realigned during the pandemic and all middle schoolers were grouped in the same building. She will encounter faces she knows, regardless if she likes them or not.
But, all transitions are touch tough. She went from a comfortably-sized middle school to a large high school full of upperclassmen3 she doesn’t know in a building that is quite spread out from one end to the other. There are new traffic patterns to learn, a whole new set of teachers and personalities to discover, and the always-dreaded first steps into the cafeteria to see who you’re can sit with or whether you’re going to sit alone.
And, on top of all that, there’s the emotion. The anxiety. This person and I don’t get along, but now we are lab partners. Wanting to fit in but unsure of how to find your place and where it is. One mistake sticks with you for all four years. The academic pressure where the next 3 1/2 years dictates the course of your future.4 I don’t know anyone in this class. Making new friends and not wanting to ignore the ones you already have. Pressure from your peers to do and try all sorts of new things.
My daughter and I are very much alike in terms of personality, so I think there’s one other common concern we shared, 33 years apart from our respective first days of high school: it’s real now. Life. School. Everything up to day one of this four-year sprint was a rehearsal. Child’s play.
And, let’s face it, childhood ended when the school bus doors closed.
I don’t remember a sense of loss or grief in any of it. It felt like what was supposed to happen as the natural progression from teen to adult. But, now I’m a parent and 2024 is a lot different than 1995. So, while I’m processing everything in my brain, what was she thinking?
Dirt Nap Q&A: Layla Paventi
I typically don’t compensate people for participating in a Q&A beyond linking to their social profiles or business, but my daughter doesn’t have anything to promote5. So, this interview cost me a Grande vanilla crème Frappuccino with chocolate chips and caramel drizzle6. Also, Starbucks is our lingua franca; she’s been visiting them with me since she was a baby, as we would stop before or after our trips to the farmer’s market78.
Anyhow, this interview was conducted over dinner on Tuesday, the night before the first day of school9. You can see the progression of her answers as she began to warm up to the questions and got more comfortable being interviewed. After all, what teenager likes being asked questions…
Layla, what do you think of yourself as: a kid, a teen, a young adult, and why?
A young adult, mostly, because I'm gonna be driving soon. I'm going to get a job next summer. I’m already feeling the pressures of growing up. For instance, I felt pushed by my teachers to get a job this summer, but I didn't get a chance to get my working papers from the nurse.
Tell me what it's like to be my kid. What's your childhood been like?
I don't know. Like, I don't know how I answer that. Honestly.
Do you think you've had a happy childhood?
Oh no, yeah. I pretty good childhood.
Do you feel like there are things you missed out on? Do you think we were too strict or too high strung?
I think it was pretty good, like, in ways that I understood the way you were strict sometimes because you cared, even if I didn't see it then.
What would you say is the earliest memory you have as a child?
Okay? I talked about this with Lizzy [her friend] last night. So, we're at the old house. It’s the old, old blue and yellow swing set. I distinctly remember being three years old. That's, the biggest thing that I remember. I’m not moving; it's just a picture.
Mom is standing next to the big tree in the backyard and I'm on the slide. I'm wearing that teal jacket10. My hair is in pig tails and I’m wearing black leggings. But it’s almost like I'm not looking at through my own eyes. You know where the garage was? It’s almost like I'm looking from right there. That's how normally it is when I picture these in my mind.
What is your best memory? What is the memory that stands out and get for you from your childhood, where you say, “Yeah, that’s what I that's if I have no other memory from being a kid, that’s I want to have.”
The trip to Disney World, but specifically the day that we sat watching the fireworks in the pool.
Each generation thinks that kids grow up quicker now than they did. I think my parents might have said that about me. And I think, it’s possible that you grew up quicker than I did when I was your age. Do you think that that’s the case, that kids grow up quicker now?
Probably because we're exposed to a lot more new things than you guys were in the ‘80s or ‘90s. Like, phones and the internet. I think that we there's more things to go out and do and we have more opportunities in school for volunteer work and more job opportunities.
Okay, so you mentioned phones. Are you happy that you have a cell phone? Or would you just assume that cell phones, in general, just disappeared forever?
No, I'm happy because I have more contact with my friends.
But if cell phones weren't a thing, do you think your life would be your life would be different?
Yeah, probably.
You know, you were nine years old when Covid happened and we all got sheltered at home together for a long time. How do you think the pandemic influenced the way you grew up in school, academically and socially.
Well, socially, I didn't see any really get to see anyone and I didn’t get to talk to my friends. So, I felt almost like alone, kind of, but academically I feel like it slowed everyone down all by a lot. They were way behind because of it, but then [teachers and school leaders] had to shift everything around. Everything got confusing because they switched things like science topics, and other academic classes that got switched from different grades, so we learned things earlier. And when everything reopened, we went back to learn everything all over again, almost like Covid learning was a preview or trailer for the real learning.
So, I want to switch gears a little bit. Thinking back, what is the first grown up thing that you either did or happened to you? I’m talking through this through the lens of you as a 14-year-old about to start high school, which is some grown up shit. But it’s not the first grown up thing that you’ve ever done or experienced. What do you think that was?
Babysitting [her younger sister] Ella. The first time I was physically responsible for someone’s life in the hours that I was with her.
I think that's fair. Was that kind of scary for you?
I don’t know. I just felt like everything would go wrong, like something would happen, and like you would never trust me as a babysitter again11. That’s what was in my head the entire time.
So similarly, what’s the last thing you did where you felt like you were a kid? Leave middle school?
No, actually, no. From fourth to fifth grade, going into middle school at fifth grade, which I wasn't supposed to do12. It was so sudden. No one told us.
How did that feel? I mean, you basically graduated from elementary to middle school without knowing you were going.
I wanted my moving up ceremony. (laughing)
Beyond the ceremony where everyone told you you’re special there had to be some level of “this is something brand new” right?
You always watch middle schoolers and high schoolers in movies, and it seems like high school and middle school are so easy. They're very rarely challenges, like their love lives and homework, but then you get there and it's like nothing like it.
So you’re starting high school this week, tomorrow, yeah? So that’s, the beginning of a new chapter. Do you feel like childhood officially has officially ended now?
Yeah.
Or do you feel like it ended before that?
I think it’s officially ended. It’s kind of slowly started to leave, but now it’s like, tomorrow I'm not gonna be a kid anymore.
Why do you say that?
I don’t know. It’s just that you don’t really do kid-like activities in high school. For instance, the last two years we had something like a recess after lunch. We would go outside to the basketball courts and just chilled out there during lunch. But we’re not going to have that anymore.
I’ll be driving in a couple years, and I think it’s come to everyone that four years is going to go by quickly, and we’re all going be starting college. There’s not going to be that much time before I’m applying, writing essays, and figuring out what I want to do.
So, you already feeling that?
Yeah. I’m still thinking about what I want to do, and how what I do now will affect that.
I want to talk about the concept of grief with you. There is this belief that you go through a cycle of emotions when it comes to grief before you can get to acceptance. I want to ask you whether you feel like you've gone through them. They’re denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. In terms of childhood and feeling like childhood is over, I want to know, do you feel like you've gone through denial and that your childhood is sort of done?
I feel like my steps are in a different order. I don’t really think I went through bargaining. To me, it’s denial then acceptance, and that’s probably it.
So, no anger that you know you’re not a kid anymore?
No, I’m just nervous. It’s all it is. I don't really feel angry that I’m not a kid anymore, because it was going to happen at some point, and it was just, I was just seeing it. But I love just hiding from it.
No depression about it, no bargaining… “I want this back. I would give anything to have something back.”
No, because I knew it was going happen, and I’m kind of trying to accept it.
Okay, last question, what’s something you're looking forward to in high school?
I’m getting more opportunities for things I want to do. I want to take architecture classes and law classes. In that law class, you get to go visit jails and courthouses and things like that, where you could, like, decide if you want to go down that path. In my junior year, I want to take a college credit class, and that's probably going to weigh in on whether I want to pursue a path in architecture. Mostly it’s the opportunities we're going to have.
Is there something that I missed that you want to share?
No, I think that’s everything.
Thank you. I love you, Bob.
Love you too.
Final thoughts on finality…
Dirt Nap is the Substack newsletter about death, grief and dying that is written and edited by Jared Paventi. It’s published every Friday morning. Dirt Nap is free and we simply ask that you subscribe and/or share with others.
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She left around 6:50 a.m. The bus was due at 7:05 a.m. but didn’t come for another 12 minutes.
High school: Six out of 10. Wouldn’t recommend.
The high school has about 1,300 students.
It’s probably closer to three, right? You apply to college with a transcript that includes grades through your junior year.
As parents, we’re standing firm on the social media shit.
It was triple star day, so it worked out fine.
True story. The baristas at Starbucks in Syracuse’s Armory Square (RIP) used to make her a special iced coffee — milk with juuuuust enough coffee to turn the color. I called it Cafe au Layla.
A father with a baby stroller is/was the ultimate skip-to-the-front-of-the-line tool at the CNY Regional Market.
Her sister was at gymnastics with my wife.
I know the exact one she is referencing.
Oh My God is she my fucking kid. A true Paventi-Mancini hallmark is self-defeat before the contest even starts.
See the above note about the school district realignment of grades.
Nice job Layla! This is great. You let your dad off cheap though. I think he owes you a few more Grande vanilla crème Frappuccinos with chocolate chips and caramel drizzle. :) Good luck with the next adventures. Loved being a fly on the wall for this reflection and conversation, Jared.
I love this post and its focus on stages of life and how we feel about them and prepare to meet them. I also have a grandson entering high school this fall and I’d love to raise some of these same questions with him. A thoughtful post today. Nice.