The Last First

Newsletter 2024-04-25

Everybody remembers their child’s firsts. Their first steps. Their first words. Their first international crime spree. If you think your kid won’t launch a string of pan-European diamond heists, you grossly underestimate what they’ve been learning on TikTok. Not as many parents keep track of their child’s lasts. The last time you washed their hair. The last time you picked them up. The last time they asked you for money. That final one isn’t real, of course. I might not outright beg my mom and dad for cash, but I fight awfully hard for those dollar bills in the adult Easter egg hunt. Recently, my youngest, Waffle, had another last, and also a first: our family’s final First Communion. One chapter closed as another began. I wish I could figure out what kind of book these chapters are in. I thought the genre was suspense, but I have a sinking feeling it might be horror.

I’ve recently become more nostalgic about these sorts of milestones. My kids are growing and changing at an alarming rate. Not that I noticed on my own. I needed invasive tech companies to rub it in my face. Every week on Facebook and through various cloud storage services, I’m bombarded with pictures of what my family and I were up to on this day some random number of years ago. It always hits me right in the heart, except when it’s a photo from my wife’s work that was automatically uploaded. I don’t have particularly strong feelings about that image of replacement laptop cables from 2012. The rest of the images are emotionally devastating. It’s hard for me to fathom that my kids were ever that small. I always picture them at their current size, even though I know they had to be more diminutive at one point. Otherwise they wouldn’t have fit inside Lola without making her explode. There’s a saying that the days are long but the years are short. That’s becoming more and more true all the time. The girls are growing every day, not that you’d know it by the food they refuse to eat—or the “food” they insist on eating instead. Based on the number of Pringles fragments I find scattered around the house, I can’t confirm that any of it’s making it into their mouths. They must be getting nutrition from somewhere. They continue to need bigger clothes. Now two of them raid Lola’s closet instead of just one. At least I get to keep my clothes to myself. Not that they’d wear my stuff even if it were in their size. Having uniquely terrible taste means never having to share.

That’s not a luxury my daughters get to experience. All four of them wore the same First Communion dress. Not at the same time, although that would have been quite a feat. God doesn’t give bonus points for added difficulty. Lola bought the First Communion dress second-hand back when Facebook Marketplace and Craigslist were a little sketchier. Actually, they’re still as dangerous as they’ve ever been. We just care less. These days, I have people show up at my house to pick up five-dollar (or free) items all the time. I find it quaint when someone is concerned enough about their own survival to insist on meeting at a neutral location. If I were a serial killer, I wouldn’t find my victims using the most invasive social media app ever created that tracks your every move and records your every word. Make the police work for it a little. When our oldest, Betsy, was in second grade, Lola met the dress seller in a McDonald’s parking lot. Lola had Betsy try it on in the McDonald’s bathroom before she’d make the deal. It’s hard to think of a less appropriate venue for such an elegant and holy dress. Then again, the son of God was born in a manger, so who’s to say what’s appropriate? If they had Big Macs back then, we could have ended up with a very different nativity story.