Amazingly that’s what my parents called me as a child….‘little big head’….apparently, according to numerous accounts, as a baby I was merely more than a big head---one would think your parents would be ashamed to share that but not mine.  Today, little big head has grown up and she has a regular sized head like the rest of us homosapiens but the name still stuck.  Now that I am about to graduate I think my parents are losing it.  I don’t know how many of our graduates have parents who seem to think that your graduating is synonymous with them loosing you.  My mother has now taken to random acts of crying and hugging and the name ‘little big head’ is making a comeback, my father on the other hand seems to be stuck down memory lane and she joins him every so often to recall things that I did but want to forget.  I love them both but I AM NOT GOING OFF TO WAR!!! I am simply graduating from university --- I’m very sorry to disappoint my parents but I will be around for some many years to come mooching off both in almost the same ways as before!!!!!

Seriously though, I can understand my parent’s point of view because it is hard to believe that I am leaving University, it feels like I just started. I could go on about the nausea I feel when I realize that now I really have to forge out on my own but let’s face it we all knew that this had to happen sometime.  Until that fateful time however when the proverbial ‘bird’ (or in my case little big head) must leave the nest I would not like to think of graduation as the end but instead as the beginning of something new.  I will take time these days to thank my parents for their support (a little known fact is I cried my way through half of my university career), their hard work and understanding through the three years of panicked phone calls about me failing XYZ class or missing XYZ test cause I may have pink eye or the flu or the Ebolavirus, the financial assistance (which I am not so sure we should be in such a hurry to end) but most of all for just being family when all I needed was just that---family.  I guess listening to the weeping and story telling is a small price to pay...