She's Leaving Home

She left home today.

In actual fact, I still can't believe it. I'm used to being the one who leaves all the time. Today I was left. By my little girl.

Why is that so damn hard?

It's a ritual every parent goes through if they're fortunate enough to have a kid who grows up and makes it through high school to go to college:

You get left. Get over it. Be happy. Be thrilled. Count your blessings.

The end of the summer is always filled with a touch of regret. We try to hold on to those long, hot days and those cool, dreamy nights. We get by wearing the flimsiest of clothes, and watch enviously as the toddlers run around in nothing at all.

It's a season of endings, and beginnings -- so many of them this summer. We watch Ted Kennedy buried by a line-up of presidents. Gone: Les Paul. And Dominick Dunne.

Meanwhile thousands of families are driving their kids to airports and train stations. Pulling up on college campuses in SUVs, unloading crates from Bed, Bath and Beyond. Thrilled and miserable, all at the same time.

Not that teenagehood was any picnic. Not, not easy. (No one warns you properly about this. That adoring pumpkin with dancing black eyes and inky bottle curls will suddenly not want anything to do with you.)

So yesterday I spent three hours making my daughter leave out of her two overstuffed suitcases half the things she didn't need. Seven black skirts? On what planet? I laughed. She cried. It may have been the longest conversation we've had in four years.

And still. It's a moment suffused with memory and loss. Tonight, I keep wondering when she'll be back for dinner. Her room smells of the perfume I told her not to buy. Her beaten-up Jetta -- with no one to drive it -- sits in the driveway.

It's a moment that reminds us that as we grow older, others rise to take our place. If we do our jobs right as parents, that is the way it should be. (And hey, President Obama, I sure hope there'll be a job for her by the time she graduates.)

But the leaving. At the airport, she hugged me tightly -- like she used to when her hands were still tiny, and when it was still ok to call me "Mommy" -- and tears filled her eyes, too.

Of all the many things they don't tell you when you have children, here's a new one I've learned and pass along to young parents everywhere:

They will eventually leave you. If you're lucky.

And you're gonna hate it.

Follow Sharon Waxman on Twitter: www.twitter.com/sharonwaxman

Comments

[mlaiuppa]

They come back.

They just don't stay.

If you're lucky.

[NoSillyName]

Poignant, but obviously, no one has to tell you that children will grow up and leave, do they?

[SageFire]

Here is something else they don't tell you. They come back as something far bigger than when they went away! You get to sit around the dining room table with a bottle of wine and tell them what you really did in college. You get to spend a week sleeping on their sofa on the other side of the country and they make you breakfast. Each time at the airport it is a little easier because you know there will be the next time. I wish I could have understood that heart crushing first year, but I wouldn't have believed it anyway.

[MerhabaAbi]

I miss Dusty. But Dustin is a hell of a good young man. I'm amazed at how strongly I reacted to this story. He's moved out and back in three times now and goes to school where and lives just 15 miles away. But I know someday soon, he'll move far away and permanantly. I don't know how I'll cope with that.

[odyssey58]

My son's friends have all recently left for college, most for the first time. He doesn't know yet what he wants to be when grows up so I have him for a little longer. He does go away for a few days to work at a farm and he's applied to work at a ski resort in Vermont. He's kind of weaning himself from us.
I always knew the time would come when he would leave so I made a point of treasuring every moment with him. That was the best advice I got when he was born

[eleanorhawking]

I share your sentiment, but at least you aren't putting her on a bus that will take her to basic training, and then, perhaps Afghanistan. As your heart is broken, count your blessings as well.

[LaurieAnn]

"They will eventually leave you. If you're lucky."

Please accept my heartfelt congratulations to you and your daughter for being able to so fully experience this right of passage. I'm sure you are very aware that this is a turning point in both of your lives. This transition is bittersweet as you so eloquently illustrate in your essay.

Thank you, Ms. Waxman for recognizing by your words quoted above that a parent who's children leave to pursue their own independent lives are indeed lucky. At this stage in my life, when many of my friends are watching their own children leave for college, I'm coming to grips with the reality that my autistic child (age 12) will most likely never make this transition. When I became a parent it never occurred to me that there was a possibility my child would do any less than I was able to do. Now, well, I need to learn how to dream new dreams.