Last week, our first daughter pulled on her rancid school uniform for the last time - tie pulled down to invisibility, socks puddled around her ankles, friends' inky scribblings festooning the shirt that always hung half outside the pleated skirt with the mysterious green paint stain, writes Kathy Sheridan.
That aching pull between the inner child and emerging adult was never more evident. Even as they donned kiddie pyjamas to run around the school, throwing eggs, hiding the clocks and locking a few heroically resigned teachers in an office, the hollow eyes told another story.
The Leaving Cert looms. That sheltered world where parents stood poised to save the day is no more. For these child-women, the truth is dawning: there is no hiding place any more; no more pyjamas under uniforms in winter.
During this week of ritual and partings, they opened the letters they had written as apprehensive first years. "I love going on the school bus in the mornings . . . I have loads of new friends and I know everyone's name now. But I miss primary school . . ."
They unwrapped the "time capsules" assembled in third year, hooting now at the poster of the once-revered Backstreet Boys, at classmates' letters filled with yearnings for long-forgotten boys, at their innocent terror of the Junior Cert and ambition to play for the senior As in that impossibly far-off time when they would be the Big Girls.
The time capsules also contained long-ago letters from parents, bemused ramblings struggling to strike the right tone, aware that the stormy, black-clad adolescent they were writing to now would be a young woman when she would finally read it.
Six years ago, everyone told us that these years fly past. We can't have been listening, because as we stood in the school gym last week, blinking at the blown-up photos of our Leaving Cert girls and the corresponding pictures of them as small children, we moped about like people in shock, wondering wistfully, stupidly, repeatedly, where all the tender years had flown and why it ever mattered that her shirt always hung half outside her skirt.
The departure of our class of 2003 was marked by two days of ritual. A dozen teachers gave up a Sunday afternoon to produce a profoundly moving ceremony of light, Mass, music, well-chosen words and hospitality.
As the girls sang and spoke, walked solemnly up the chapel with the school crest and an altar cloth raised aloft, our minds scrolled back the years as an era vanished before our eyes.
"We are your past. We are your present,"a nun told her erstwhile charges, "but you are the creators of your own tomorrows. Be people of hope. Be dreamers of dreams. Be people of whom it is proudly said : 'We knew them when they were young'."
A parent spoke of the light that had always burned for them at home - ". . . and when you find that the light [out in the world\] is flickering, blown by the storms of pain and rejection, remember that there will always be a light burning for you in that place called home."
Two days later, they donned caps and gowns and ran hand-in-hand into a roar of applause and emotion for their final roll call.
Once again, the teachers were there, holding it all together, the same men and women who had overseen the tentative steps in first year, the letter-writing, the time capsules, the rows and reconciliations; the same tutors and deans who had shepherded them through those challenging, turbulent, fabulous years of joy and grief, learning and self-discovery.
When a family was bereft or a child trauma- tised by some crass way of the outside world, they were the ones to whom we sent the worried parental notes and trusted to keep a watchful eye. And here they were still, being funny, uplifting, positive, even profound at times, remembering without a prompt the girl who shone on the school tours, the one who could sing or recite a poem or bring the house down with a shaft of wit, the quiet one who could inspire a bereaved child to laugh again, the one who was always there for troubled souls, the shy one who took on the label-heads and the bullies. Astonishingly, they could remember when it was your girl. But she knows that already. She will remember them when the light is flickering, as will we.
In our wistful scroll-back, those years were made more meaningful than we ever realised by the unsung deeds of those men and women.
This class of 2003, with its aspirant nurses, artists, businesswomen, musicians, beauticians, scientists, cooks, dentists, doctors, child-carers, pharmacists and teachers - yes, several of them - did not present flowers to their teachers as an empty formality. They also cheered them to the rafters and talked of them privately with lively affection.
"Yeah, we do like them," mused a girl who could never be described as teacher's pet. "In the past year or two, we began to see them as nice, supportive, funny adults. Some of them are very enlightened, others aren't. You just think they're on your side".
Teachers, you can be heroes. Many of you are. Enjoy your rest.