When you have a child graduating this year as we do, it feels all-consuming.

I wake up at night in sweaty fits, wondering if I have enough napkins for the graduation party and how I’m going to conceal my snotted-up tissues during the ceremony and if they make super duper extra waterproof mascara.

It’s a lot for a parent, it’s a lot for the students, and even if you don’t know anyone graduating, it’s a good time to take check of your own beaker.

More:Two tactics for (painfully) topping off the tank

I’ve used the term “graduated cylinder” many times in my science-loving life. It’s that tube you used back in chemistry class with the numbers up the side so you could correctly measure whatever liquid you needed. (A beaker is a little different, but close enough and more fun to say.)

Graduated cylinders come in many sizes, too. There are tiny ones and skinny ones and wide ones and tall ones, but each of them has very distinct markings to let you know just how much you’ve got inside.

Drop the “d” on one of those, and you’ve got “graduate.” In my emotional mind, these two things seem very connected. Each step of one’s schooling is pouring in a little more into that cylinder, like when you graduate from crawling to walking, preschool to kindergarten, middle school to high school, and all of the micro graduations along the way.

You can’t tell me that learning to use a toilet or drive a car doesn’t merit a ceremony.

As a mom who will miss her son dearly when he goes off to college, I can look at this whole thing a few ways. I can pretend that his beaker is completely full, and when he flips his tassel, it will be at the brim, full of accomplishments and all over and done.

Or I can pretend that this monumental event is just a great big mark along the side of a really, really massive graduated cylinder, and the clear glass allows me to look lower at all the other times he filled it with achievements and look above at all the wonderful things to come.

So listen up, class of 2022, celebrate adding to that beaker just a little more but don’t forget to look at all the good things to come and work for them. This world needs you now to keep viruses in check, keep transportation costs low, keep the peace, keep greening things up, and keep filling up those graduated cylinders long after graduation. We know you can do it.