Catch and Release

Motherhood is such a strange and torturous thing.  You literally grow a human being inside your own body, experience the worst pain to bring them into the world, pour every ounce of energy into raising them, only to have them eventually start a completely independent existence.  If you're lucky, that existence will be adjacent to your own, with varying degrees of attachment, but still very much separate.

Like all parents, we know the day will come when our child will be a legal adult, and will no longer depend on us in the way they had up to that point. It's this invisible, intangible finish line that they will reach sometime after they turn 18.  All the years leading up to that moment are a roller coaster in the best and worst ways.  So much information, so many skills, so much love needs to be instilled in this being, and even if you had infinite time, it wouldn't be quite enough to give you total peace.  But time marches on and you hope you provided all of the care they will need to be happy and healthy and successful at meeting the challenges they're about to face.  No matter how many times you thought "damn, why can't they grow up and move out already?!", the game changes completely when they finally do.

Yesterday was the big day for my very first baby.  While I have been relatively prepared for it to come, there was an internal list I had been keeping of all the things that needed to happen first.  However, my list really is just mine, and my very first baby decided she was ready now.  My list sits unchecked and I'm grieving that, as I also feel what I imagine is the typical sadness and nostalgia that comes with an emptying nest.  The sadness, the anger, the disappointment, the regret...it has all mixed together into this heavy sludge that feels like it's pouring into my lungs and stealing all the air.  Maybe that's just the tears, which were plentiful and painful last night, anticipating that moment when she'd get in her car and pull out of our driveway.  

There is so much I wanted to say and do, but I just lay in my bed, paralyzed by all the emotions.  The deep sobs wracked my body and I swear I cried an ocean.  I heard her singing to herself as she was packing, and the realization that this would no longer be a daily occurrence hit me like a speeding freight train. And I sobbed harder.  My unchecked internal list screamed inside my brain.  She hasn't graduated. She doesn't have a real place to live. She'll be so far away. We don't get to have a proper send-off.  I cannot emphasize enough the grief of losing all of these opportunities and being powerless to change it.

After a broken night's sleep, I woke up with red, puffy eyes and a gaping wound on my heart.  I went through the motions of getting ready for work.  I cried in the car on the way to the office, and then put every bit of myself into focusing on the tasks in front of me.  After several hours alternating between ignoring the pain and marinating in it, I knew I needed to write. It's the only way I can drain the sludge and start to breathe again.

I know that this is something most parents experience and that time will make it easier. I know that the end of one era is just the beginning of a new one. Logic reminds me that each phase of life comes with growing pains, and this is certainly no exception.  The relationship my daughter and I have is not ending; it's under construction.  We're creating room for what is to come.  But I also just need time to sit in these feelings for a minute, to mourn my child's childhood, before I can be completely happy for her adulthood. She isn't mine to keep.  The memories of late night feedings, field trip chaperoning, bedtime snuggles are what I can hold tight.  All the rest has to be released.