Crossing over

On the transitions we make when crossing over bridges between our identities.

I got a call to substitute high school drama yesterday. It is Dead Week, a week where there is no instruction, just study hall. Kids are squirrely but usually don’t need much supervision as they have four full days of study hall.

It was also the middle of Senior Week, and my free hours coincided with the big events.

At the American School here in Riyadh, there is a beautiful tradition called the Senior Walk.

The graduating class dons their blue caps and gowns and parades through the massive school grounds. First, through elementary school, where younger siblings hold up pickets of themselves with their future class year under their picture.

From there, they proceed to the library and the middle school, walking past their old classrooms and lockers, and even small majlis, a nod to their host (or home) country’s iconic meeting place.

Finally, they round out the high school halls and walk down the stairs to the cafeteria, then out into a central patio.

Standing under the shade of a tree and out of the best sight lines, I watched students walk by.

Some were crying. Most were beaming. They hugged and high-fived teachers as they walked to an open plaza. In the middle stood a big wooden structure, fashioned like a bridge.

I had noticed the bridge when I went to check in at the high school office. Painted in different languages and bold colors, seniors get an interlocking panel to paint over year after year. Wood is splintered off, revealing the previous class’ words in some places.

Seniors walk over this bride, completing their transition from high school senior into college-bound adult, with their parents waving and snapping pictures on their phones.

I cried.

Strangers asked if I had a graduating child (who, me? The 40-year-old twenty-something? Pssh.).

No, I replied, just here to clap them into the next phase.

It got me thinking about transitions and crossing over the bridges between our identities and our roles.

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My 30s changed me - there is absolutely no doubt about that. I got married a week before turning 30 and changed careers nine months after, had a baby at 31 another at 33, moved to France at 35, lost a parent at 37, left a job two months before turning 40 and moved to Saudi Arabia just weeks after.

When was I not in motion? When was I not shedding a part of my identity while grasping for the essence of who I was? Searching relentlessly for who I wanted to be?

The bridge the students crossed shook the dust off one of my early memories. My mom was the leader of Daisy Scout Troop 348, teaching my classmates how to care for and ride a horse or how to start a fire and accompanying us on overnight camping trips.

At the end of kindergarten or first grade, we gathered in the Brookview Elementary School gym (not pictured, but eerily similar to this AI image and, yes, I had a bowl cut at age 5).

There was a little white bridge to cross. The bridge was meant to signify your transition to Brownies, of course, but also accompany one of your first big life transitions.

A part of the ceremony, we had to look in a mirror that was meant to be a pond. It could have been a mirror, or maybe even crinkled tinfoil. I don’t remember if it was before or after crossing.

My mom asked each on of us to reflect on who we are and the girl we wanted to become.

Oh, the symbolism.

I remember wanting to be a ballerina as a girl. I have never taken a ballet class. To be a mother. I have two gremlins.

But after that, I didn’t know. And now that I am a fully-grown adult, aside from being a mother, what else do I want to be?

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Thirty-five years after that ceremony, I have crossed countless “bridges”. From a teenager to an adult, from the US to Spain, from a single woman to a mother. Between professional roles, between versions of myself I thought I knew.

I could skip across some without looking down.

Others left me with a lot of apprehension, almost like a rickety rope bridge that would fray and fall away at any minute. Like going from mothering with my mom to mothering without her.

Oddly, moving Saudi was a bridge I could walk over with confidence, even if I couldn’t see the other side. I felt like I was leaving behind a life that no longer fit me. I see it more as a transition, rather than a connection between two versions of myself. Progress, even.

I am currently helping college-bound kids craft their Common App Personal statements as a freelancer for an EdTech company. I always temper them with the question of where they are in the process of finding their narrative, but also with gauging how they are feeling about the process of applying to college and leaving home.

There is excitement, and there is also apprehension. There is, surprisingly, a healthy dose of nostalgia. For them, it’s a bridge between who they used to be, and who they are becoming.

They don’t know the transition that awaits them in the coming months or further down the road. But it’s joyful. The AIS-R students reach the top of the structure in the early morning, heat already sizzling at the surface, sun bright on their face and their future on the horizon.

The transition that awaits us in 2028 when we leave Saudi give me pause. Like, a scary amount of pause. How will my kids fit back into their Spanish lives? What will I do for work? Where will we be living and how will our financial situation change anything?

As my mom would have said, “We’ll cross that bridge when we get there, Catherine.”