Top 10 for Mom as (only) daughter graduates from high school

I have to keep reminding myself that my daughter's high school graduation is not about me.

No matter that I spent four months overhauling house and garden for incoming family and planning a graduation party for 450 of her Facebook friends — half of whom won't attend, and what am I going to do with all that chicken.

Nor is it important that I fielded all that high school angst, not to mention breast fed her, potty trained her, and held my hands out when there was no towel for her retching tummy that one Halloween when she was 2 and thought she could eat all her candy in one sitting.

This is her moment. And to help me remember, I have compiled my "Top Ten Reminders For A Co-Dependent Mother Preparing For Her (Only) Daughter's Graduation from High School":

1. My daughter's high school graduation is all about her. This one bears chanting like a mantra.

2. Graduating from high school is a happy occasion. I will avoid sobbing on Emily's princess bed in the lavender bedroom she and I painted when she was 12, while she throws away all her Beanie Babies.

3. Just as I will avoid maudlin, so will I also avoid holding every emotion inside until the after-graduation party, when I collapse in a heap next to the stereo at home, which is playing Ben Folds' "I am the Luckiest," at which point the graduate is called in from the other room to sit beside me on the floor and stroke my hair. This happened with her brother three years ago. It will not happen with Emily.

4. I will avoid all sad music. Kenny Loggins' "House at Pooh Corner," which Emily sang in first grade every Friday at morning meeting — and I cried plenty then — does not have to be a running CD in my head. Using the mind-over-matter Lamaze techniques that must be good for something, I can easily shift to "Inna-Gadda-da-Vida" by Iron Butterfly, or "Spirit in the Sky" by Norman Greenbaum.

5. Speaking of acid rock, I will quit mentally comparing my daughter's happy "500 of Days of Summer" high-school experience to my dark 1970s Jim Morrison experience. I will remind myself how it's a good thing that with each generation, we get further and further away from Woodstock.

6. Just because Emily has her entire life to look forward to, and all I have is menopause, does not give me the right to eat half her sheet cake at her graduation party, including the name, "Emily."