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L’s Last Sunday

Sunday 17 August 2025

I never do well with lasts, and one of the most significant lasts for our family has arrived today: L’s last full day at home. She’ll be heading to Gainesville tomorrow in the early afternoon to move into her dorm, meet her roommate, and settle into her new life. The move-in won’t be until Tuesday, but she’s leaving tomorrow.

“She’s leaving home” echoes in Paul McCartney’s voice as I type that. Such a different departure for our Girl tomorrow. No running away. No confused parents reading a note the next morning. No sense of an underlying, unseen, misunderstood neglect. The suggestion in the song is that the unnamed girl won’t be back to see her family for a long time, perhaps the longest of times. Our Girl will be coming back for Thanksgiving for sure, but those three months will be the longest time we’ve been without her. So in a sense, I guess I still relate to the parents in the McCartney song.

It resonates for another reason, though: the parents in the song in some sense or another failed their daughter, and they didn’t even realize that they had. It’s every parent’s nightmare: that you’ve somehow failed your children without realizing you’ve failed them. We’re sending our daughter out into the world, the first steps she’s taking to her freedom, and that fear haunts us both, I think. Parents always reassure each other when they express these fears, “Oh, you did a good job with her. She’s going to be fine.” But everyone says that, and everyone can’t be right. That’s what the song is all about: everyone would have reassured those parents that they did a fine job raising their daughter. I know we made mistakes — some big mistakes. But the effort itself counts for more than we realize, I think.

I understand that only now about my own parents. They made mistakes with me, no question. But I never doubted their motivations were pure. I never doubted the security they were trying to provide for me in ways that I know view as less-than-ideal.

I also understand how difficult it must have been for them when I left shortly after college for Poland. They know it would be months, possibly a couple of years, before they’d see me again. And when I came back to the States, I settled in Boston — a fourteen-hour drive from their town. And when I left Boston, I returned to Poland. From 1996 to 2005, I really only saw them a handful of times. That must have been more difficult for them than I even now can imagine. Certainly more difficult than what we’re facing with L leaving, for we have E still at home with us, and my parents had no other child to comfort them with his proximity.

Tomorrow our daughter is leaving for college. That sounds a lot less harsh than “tomorrow our daughter is leaving for good,” but in truth, I think that’s what’s happening. Certainly, she’ll come home for long visits (she’ll be here for almost a month for Christmas), but I doubt she’ll ever live with us again in the sense that she lives with us now. And has lived with us for eighteen and a half years. She is indeed leaving home in that sense. After college, there will be grad school or a job, and even when she’s done with all of that, she won’t want to come back to this little corner of the world. With a degree in biomedical engineering, she’ll have more opportunities in bigger cities with more universities and research facilities. She’s already talking about California So perhaps we’ll see after all what my parents went through.

In the meantime, we enjoyed the day the best we could. K made racuchy for breakfast and rosół for dinner. It’s been a pattern for the last few days: fixing her favorite foods (crab cakes for dinner Friday; K’s specially marinated chicken for dinner last night).

And then there was the final packing. L went to get a few favorites to take with her, including an entire bulk box of Cheez-Its. “I can’t live without my favorite junk food,” she laughed.

The Boy chipped in, washing L’s car for her as he listened to some podcast or another.

And then an early dinner.

Thus passed L’s final Sunday here.

Saturday Night Ice Cream

Saturday 16 August 2025

I took only one picture yesterday. Unfortunately, I caught L mid-bite. And you cant

When It Became Clear that

Friday 15 August 2025

the Boy had won in Monopoly.

L Leaving

Sunday 03 August 2025

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.