|   Issues

If your child is already in high school, I’m too late. Sign up now for a leave of absence from work in your child’s senior year to make up for the parental slackery you did not even know you were excelling in now.

If you have more time before your child graduates, then Heads Up and read on. I fell in the too-late-to-save category, and as God is my witness, I will help others avoid this fate.

It turns out that when a child graduates in present-day northern Colorado, parents must display a shrine to the child at the graduation party. You maybe didn’t know this, but now you do. So get going. You don’t want to “do” 18 years of Creative Memories in one month. That’s called Speed Scrapbooking, and it’s a gateway drug to heroin.

You’ll spend a week gathering photos, realize that your pile is small because you forgot to take any from 1995 until last fall, and so have to scrounge around in the boxes and boxes of artwork stacked on your refrigerator door for one of your child’s drawings to represent all of her junior-high years. Then you’ll draw stick figures of her for the other years you neglected to chronicle.

You’ll lay everything out in your dining room, begin taping photos down, run out of tape, go to the store to get some, and not only waste an entire day but also fill up your dining room table with crap you can’t even eat.

You’ll find a photo of her, finally, when she was 8, but because it’s torn, you’ll draw in her right shoulder and arm, and this will make her look like Ziggy.

Designing at lightning speed and sweating a lot as you glance from your work to the clock like one of those chefs in a nervy cooking-show competition, you’ll discover you have no sense of unity, balance, contrast or proportion. You’ll look up “scrapbooking” on the Internet and copy other people’s pages, and at least one of yours will look like the 50th anniversary page for somebody’s grandparents in Kansas.

Two days before the party, when you should be drinking champagne because you don’t have to get up at 5am anymore to make your child’s lunch and take her to school, you’ll instead be in a fabric store buying buttons—not for the purpose of fastening anything, but because, in a surprising move, buttons have begun to look cute when they’re stuck to a photo. This is because you’ve entered the “Scrapbooker” phase of your artistic development in which any small, random objects placed on a photo appear to enhance it, if only until you’ve had a good night’s sleep.

The day before the party, you will finish the shrine so it is at least recognizable as such when you light candles around it and hire someone to stand there dressed like the Virgin Mary. But the tape holding everything together won’t last, and the pictures and buttons will fall off when you unfold the shrine because it was never anything more than a humble tri-fold science board.

You’ll fix it, again and again. Then you’ll fix it. Probably you won’t see your child accept her diploma because you’ll be taping something back onto her shrine in the 27th row of Moby Arena.

Oh sure, you can choose to NOT make the shrine. But then your kid won’t have one when all the other kids do. You think this won’t ruin her graduation party? Whatever. You’ve come this far. If you want to risk her self-esteem now, I guess you can.

I suggest instead that you start snapping a lot of photos. Buy your shrine supplies a little at a time so you don’t have to buy them when you’re also financing a party, a gift of substance and a college education. Do your guests a favor and study the elements of design. Practice cutting anything—bed sheets, paper plates, lampshades, loose dog fur—into the shape of a heart. And visit a scrapbooking store—yes, they exist—to set up your line of credit and get over the culture shock before you have to spend every Monday there for a month.

This will all be worth it when your child sees the shrine and stares in horror, her hand clapped over her mouth so as not to laugh or scream or maybe weep at your efforts. Ignore this lack of appreciation and pat yourself on the back for the astounding self-control and good manners you have cultivated in her!