This is the season of amazing transformation.
Unkempt, hoodie-wearing, slouchy teens miraculously metamorphize into stunning beauties and dashing gentlemen.
Spring brings us the beauty of nature, with the unfurling of leaves and the blossoming of flowers. What spring is to plants and sunny days with gentle breezes, prom is to teenagers, but faster and more dramatically: It turns our kids out resplendent in all their glory of youth, vitality and pulchritude.
Teenage boys suddenly are sharp and debonair in their suits or tuxedos, with fresh haircuts and shaves. The transformation goes beyond their garments, too: They glow with pride, though they try to look cool and unaffected, with new authority and gravity.
And the girls – oh, the girls. They are breathtaking. They are gorgeous, radiant, perfect.
For most of these kids, this is the best they’ve ever looked. It’s the most grown up, the most elegant, the most promising they’ve ever have been. In the morning they were children, but by night they see the adult they are rushing toward becoming.
For others, this is the apex. They are the most glorious, most handsome, most beautiful, most carefree and most full of promise that they ever will reach again in their life.
Perhaps they have struggled to be able to buy or find the clothes, the ride, the hairdo. Perhaps they felt anxiety and shame leading up to prom, wondering how they’d pull it together.
But hopefully, in this moment, they feel victorious, carefree, proud, beautiful and on top of the world.
Tomorrow the weights of the world will drag them down again, and perhaps for the rest of their life they will be trammeled upon, and hit after hit will come, but tonight is all theirs.
In this prom season, we see the spectacular metamorphosis of child to adult. We see the future rushing toward us, toward them, and the past – our little babies and toddlers and children we once cuddled and coddled – snatched from us away forever.
It’s their turn now. Welcome to the world, teenagers. Relish your youth and beauty and vigor, and shine, shine, shine on prom night.
