The proud author and father with his graduating son, Eyal, and his equally proud mother.

I write these words an hour or so after our youngest son Eyal’s graduation tonight from his yeshiva high school, Torah Academy of Bergen County (TABC), and the formal end of our family’s eight-year continuous run as TABC parents. It was a special, albeit slightly bittersweet evening as my wife and I sat together in the front rows with a good number of parents (and many close friends) who have been together with us since our son’s early days in Buds at Yeshivat Noam and of course, many newer families we only got to know when our sons started at TABC.

The commencement program ran super smoothly and clocked in at an hour and 10 minutes (I really wasn’t counting, I promise) and the speeches we heard were all heartfelt, well-delivered, personal, engaging, funny at times, and the messages from every speaker from salutatorian to the rosh yeshiva were powerful and meaningful. The two videos that the school presented blended both nostalgia and warmth and enhanced the event’s flavor even further. I confess to loving every minute of it and felt nary an urge to check or look at my phone the entire time, except to attempt to take a picture or video before realizing my wife would do it quicker, better, and faster. (I never really fully mastered the visual side of media unfortunately.)

My wife, and a few of the other mothers we know, had gone into the event thinking they would be having trouble holding back tears as our “babies” (aka our youngest sons) were graduating from high school. However, I didn’t see any tears from my wife or most of her friends tonight as I believe the general upbeat tone and flavor precluded any loud weeping or tearing up. Yet I have to admit that as I looked at my son and his smiling friends in their blue robes and listened to the upbeat words from the speakers and the videos, I began to cry a bit (although I doubt anyone saw).

I wrote in this space just before Pesach about my son’s Sarachek tournament victory being the end of my career as a “basketball parent” and what it meant to me. While sitting there at his graduation and looking at him, it hit me that this was also the end of another moment of parenting for me and my wife and many of our friends in the audience. I once heard a college adviser explain that a high school parent is a “manager” in their children’s lives, but when the child graduates and is 18 and older, the parents need to learn to let go on some level and stop managing and start supporting and encouraging. Although in our closer-knit Orthodox community, parents may tend to stay a bit more involved in their kids’ lives after high school, I believe this notion to be generally true.

Now 18, our son will never again be the middle school and high school son we worried about because we didn’t live near most of his school friends. He will never be the child whose schedule we oversaw and made sure that he was where he was supposed to be at all times. And he will never again be the son we had to check with regularly about homework, practices, games, tests, you name it. And with his going to yeshiva in Israel for next year and likely beyond, even with WhatsApp and FaceTime, the communication and relationship will change and develop further—as it must—while he matures into a young adult.

Although this change from active parent “manager” to being “off-the-clock” so to speak has been happening gradually throughout his senior year—and especially since he and his friends started driving and school began to seem less important to him—it hit me fully tonight at graduation as I looked at him in his cap and gown, all grown up. Yes, he was graduating, but my wife and I were now being given notice that our time as parent “managers” was now really over and behind us.

So I cried a bit at that realization. My wife and I will miss being our son’s “manager” on some level, even if he wouldn’t agree with that terminology. It’s not a job that we were really rushing to relinquish or get dismissed from. We will miss being those parents.

After the graduation program concluded and we were ushered into the dessert reception, I noticed that while not everyone stayed around, a healthy number of parents and graduates lingered for a while, not rushing to leave, taking pictures, getting some last words in with rebbeim, teachers, faculty, family and friends they may not see again for quite some time (or ever, in some cases) as the majority of the graduates head off for the summer and Israel and adult life beyond that. I certainly understood why, as we stood there, trying to hold onto the end of high school for just a few more minutes. I stayed later also.

Many thanks to all of the rebbeim and teachers at TABC for providing our son Eyal such a special home these past four years. For Eyal, TABC has been a place of growth, learning, maturation, and much more. Thank you!