Parenting, I’ve come to learn, is really a study in letting go.
Letting go of feeling kicks and hiccups behind your belly button.
Of swaying and swaddling.
Of carrying on your back and cutting food into tiny, mushy pieces.
Of footy pajamas.
Of tooth fairies and magic.
This week, the last of the chicks graduates from elementary school, which means letting go of little desks and recess. Of glue sticks and safety scissors. Of teachers who stand in as surrogate mothers for six hours a day and read aloud stories they’ll always carry with them.
It’s unbelievable, really.
It was just yesterday, after all, when I walked sweet JoJo into her kindergarten classroom and watched her color a cartoon animal in messy, haphazard strokes through buckets of tears. My baby, going off to school.
“She’ll be fine,” Hank said, rubbing my back as we left her behind. It felt like abandoning our young on the jungle floor.
Now she drives to the high school, where she and her peers are pacing in the dugout, waiting to get called up to the big show, adulthood. Where Spike, our second-born, will join her next year. Two of our chicks – flying through the last years in our nest.
The youngest carries the unique emotional weight of ushering in the lasts. And our baby, Sloppy Joan, an incredible empath, feels the magnitude of that weight. She notices it, tugging on me, pulling me into sadness.
But as I keep telling her, and I have to remind myself, it’s OK.
Mostly, we just have to linger in the gratitude. That’s what’s really feeding the melancholy.
We have to be grateful for the patient bus driver, lunch ladies and recess monitors who got her where she was going, opened stubborn milk cartons and picked her up when she stumbled. When it was too high to jump, but she did it anyway.
For the room moms and volunteers who crafted memories and helped her succeed. For the school nurse who poured her a little more 7Up even though she knew she was fine, because she sensed her sweet, sensitive soul needed just five more minutes of quiet.
And for the teachers … my good gracious, the teachers! There isn’t enough money in the world to compensate the saints who are our elementary school teachers.
Thank you for hugging, teaching, counseling, advising, correcting, comforting, confronting, coaching, inspiring, expanding and seeing my girls!
Every parent sends their child into the world with a head and heart full of fear. Fear that they won’t be understood. That their wings won’t open. That the environment beyond our walls will break or bruise our little humans. But, because of you, they make it. They thrive. They grow. They soar.
This week, we let go of elementary school.
We let go of a beautiful, safe community we’ve loved for 11 years.
But we let go with gratitude. So much gratitude.
Thank you.