After having L as a daily aspect of our everyday reality — a blessing, a source of joy, an occasional annoyance, a cause for worry, a source of pride, and everything else children represent in their parents’ lives — she’s about to leave for college. We have a handful of days remaining until she’s gone for good. Of course, there will be visits (some longer, others shorter), but chances are, she won’t live with us much after she leaves for the University of Florida. She’ll come for Thanksgiving and Christmas. She’ll spend a good part of summers with us. But she’ll always be returning, first to the U of F, then to wherever she pursues her graduate degrees. Then she’ll be getting her first post-college/grad school job, and the summer visits will all but disappear. She might be involved with someone by then seriously enough that Thanksgiving and Christmas will no longer be guarantees, either.
In other words, it’s nearly the end of our roles as parents of a growing girl and the beginning of a new role: parents of an adult, of a woman who is out finding her way in the world, her existence completely separate from ours in so many ways. No longer dependent on us for anything, she’ll learn to navigate the complexities of adulthood on her own terms, with as much or as little input from us as she herself chooses.
I’ve never been good with endings. They’ve always tugged at my nostalgia and regret, making me wonder if anything will ever be as good as whatever it is that’s ending. Leaving Lipnica in 1999 was so tough on me that I ended up returning. Leaving Hughes left a lingering worry that perhaps whatever followed would be somehow inferior to what I was leaving despite the advantages. Every year as a kid, the end of our week-long, vacation-like Feast of Tabernacles, which was essentially a Christmas replacement, was overwhelming: next year could never be as incredible as this year. Most visits to Poland leave me feeling a little nostalgic when we leave: “did we make the right decision coming back to the States?” I wonder for the briefest of moments while I’m still enthralled with the magic of Poland, forgetting about its drawbacks and all the opportunities living in the States provided our kids.
Logically, this ending should be the hardest of all for me. Our little girl (who is no longer a little girl) is leaving. Yet I’m strangely calm about it. Perhaps it simply hasn’t registered fully. Maybe I’m in such blinding denial that it doubles back on itself and poses as calm. It would be difficult to deny it to myself, though, as the signs are everywhere: nearly-daily trips to this or that store are producing an ever-growing pile of boxes in one corner of her room. Brief exchanges often begin, “Do we have…” and end with expressions of gratitude or furiously typing an addition to this or that shopping list on her phone. She has a growing interest in things like bedsheets and dehumidifiers, her quest for a refrigerator is entering is a recurring conversational motif. “Being an adult means paying for things one really doesn’t want to pay for” has been my refrain of the last few weeks as she complains about how much this or that costs.
The evidence abounds: why am I so relatively relaxed about L heading out to make the world her own, thus ending an eighteen-year reality for our family? Part of it certainly comes from the simple fact that she’s spent the last three or four years gradually creating her own world with her own friends, her own interests, her own passions. Pulling away, in other words. Not tugging violently (usually, though that has happened, too) but simply shifting her time from family to her own world. And K and I, in turn, have slowly released that firm grip we had on her as she starts to turn away. So in truth, we haven’t been holding hands with her (to continue the metaphor) for some time but rather walking beside her as she puts more and more distance between us. Now she’s heading down her own road as we continue down ours. Roads that will be parallel in some sense, to be sure, but not the same road.
We’ve known this was coming, in other words, and in that sense, we’ve been preparing both ourselves and her for this moment. We’ve done what we could: now it’s time to let her be L fully.