End of an Era

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Part One: Party Planning

I flip the kitchen cow calendar to February – gracing and grazing my walls since 2002 – and interrupt my mother/writing partner at work.

“Andrew’s graduation party is three months from tomorrow!’ I say.

She looks up.

“Do you want to start baking cookies today?” she asks. And goes back to typing.

Sigh.

        

Part Two: End of an Era

For years I taught college students and directed freshmen orientation programs for a school of journalism at a university back east. Every June I’d gaze at those parents sitting with their son or daughter  and launch into a ‘holding on and letting go” spiel.

I was particularly zealous the year my older son, now 22,  was a foreign exchange student overseas his junior year of high school. As gently as possible I explained to the hover parents who were freaking out about said son or daughter leaving home, that I understood. 

Empathy fairly oozed out of my pores – along with bewilderment. How could these mothers and fathers not understand if we do our job as parents right, our children leave us. That’s the whole goal of parenthood – to launch sons and daughters into adulthood. I had it all figured out, or so I thought at the time.

Until turning into a hover mother myself lately.

My youngest graduates from high school in just a few months. It truly seems like only yesterday (but it was five years ago this month) my husband and I were flying out to this small city on the prairie for his job interview at a smaller university. I went along mostly because I needed to get on a plane again after many years flight-free, thanks to my forties inflicting claustrophobia on me.

I needed to get on a plane because we were going to fly to Germany the following month for a spring break trip to see aforementioned eldest.  Freaking out about flying was not an option. And whereas my husband spent a year living and traveling in Europe as a child when his dad was on sabbatical (and my parents and in-laws had traveled extensively) I’d never been overseas.

And how could I let a phobia prevent me from seeing my older son?

So spouse and I flew to Nebraska in February, then to Germany with our younger son.  And later moved that little 8^th grader to the prairie.

Time flies too, without any pharmaceutical assistance.

And the closer it gets to younger son’s leaving home – he’s going to attend the university his dad teaches at and live in the dorms five minutes away – the more I realize this holding on and letting go thing is a lot more complicated than I thought.

I’m still an ardent proponent of the ‘letting go’ part, but I’m struck by how much I’m going to miss having any children – young adults – in the house.

It’s not about them, it’s about me.

It doesn’t matter if they go one mile or a million geographically, it’s the distance we measure in our hearts that matters.