Sitting in my third graduation ceremony, I felt sorry for the girls sitting in rows like exotic butterflies stuck in their seats, enduring advice from “grown-up‚” officials.

It was excellent stuff. About a smile or tears no longer getting you what you want and having to slog if you want a decent life.

But when you’re 15, or 17, or 19, you’re hoping (against every bit of odds) that your dress looks better than the other girls’ and that this will be the night you fall in love and live happily ever after.

And if you don’t, then well, you better had get a job or study something. You’ll find out soon enough that there is no such thing as a free lunch, and to get a life you have to have a career, not marry one.

But this year, having dragged two children through SEA and CXC, I didn’t want to advise kids. They’d had enough of that. I wanted to get their advice. They know stuff I’d forgotten.

I wanted to get up on that stage and ask SEA, CXC and Cape students some questions.

Okay, you’ve done the hardest exam of your lives, and when you got your results you cried your hearts out, because you realised nothing will be the same once you go on, that nothing, not even friendships, lasts forever, and you’ve still got baby faces, bright eyes and baby skin.

So that’s a bit sad.

But because you’re a kid you live from moment to moment, absorbing it all. There is so much to see. You don’t even know what jaded means.

Your resilience, your capacity for being diverted by new adventures, your absence of hang-ups will ensure you will have a best friend by the end of the first or second day of “big school.”

Grouchy parents

(Err, grown-ups lose that open attitude after falling into a few pits. That’s why we are so boring. We don’t like it when we fall down. We find it harder to get up than you do.)

If by now you know how to make a self-deprecating joke, you care if a friend is sad, don’t show off, love to read, make your bed and do your homework without being told you’re good, you’re cool.

It’s your parents who are a mess.

Wars, messy divorces, career battles, illnesses, tangled relationships, phobias: that’s the grown-up stuff that makes them grouchy.

But you have always kept the world new for them. They didn’t realise how much the routine of dropping you to school, the crumpled school notes in the bottom of your bag, the curve of your cheek bent over your homework did for them.

They didn’t know that the memory of you going off to your first day in primary school in uniform with a lunch kit would be tattooed in their heads forever.

They didn’t know that you created a bright montage (another tattoo) of your carefree laughter with friends, your pen-marked uniforms, your anxious face when we arrived late to pick you up, your uneaten, sodden, juice-soaked sandwich, your curtsey at a concert, your triumph at making student of the month, your surprising insights and witticisms and your manner on the phone mimicking ours.

We want to know. How do you do it? How do your tears turn into smiles in seconds; how do you recover from disappointments, find it so easy to forgive?

How do you find every event so interesting that it is recounted in breathless episodes? How come you’re not afraid to try new foods, games, sports, friends and cultures?

How come you don’t see race, or socio-economic “groupings” simply friendly faces? How come you want to be a doctor, scholar, painter, and pilot all in one; you don’t see limits?

I want to say don’t become like us too quickly. Squirm in your seats, enjoy your racing hearts, and when the ceremony is over go off and be butterflies.

Let us watch you and be new again.