You spend hours, days, nights, weeks, years, decades loving your children every moment – deeply, wholeheartedly, sacrificially – only to get to their teenage years and realize that you have to start gradually letting them go.
To a backdrop of beautiful songs playing on the Alexa on a new album called We Will Never Be the Same by The Good Lovelies, who performed Sunday night here at Orcas Center, I went about tidying up the inanimate objects in our house while working through the absence of a child yet again. I took him to the ferry landing early this morning and said goodbye. He is off to experience his second year of college, and I am back with the dependable companions of housework – dishes, dusting, vacuuming, laundry – that keep my hands busy as my mind drifts in and out of some of the most significant memories of my life.
Mothering is abundant with sorrowful joy.
And just like that, he is gone for another year…
Edee,
I found the photos of your son’s departure beautiful and wonderfully moving. I hope he was able to absorb something of that ethereal morning, leaving his storied archipelago on a rumbling ferry brightly lit at dawn. It is like a scene from Hal Foster’s Prince Valiant in the days of King Arthur extravaganzas in the Sunday papers. Now it is your young prince setting of on his life adventure to do great deeds and slay his dragons.
I have to say that when our own children left the nest for school in distant places, my wife and I also grieved, but commented on how nice and quiet the mornings were. But of course, you worry and miss them. But I can tell you that the best awaits you. For all the sturm und drang children cause, eventually they do grow up. With luck they will marry someone decent. But for you the greatest joy awaits: grandchildren!! I would never have believed it, but it’s true. Of course, you will worry about them as well, but the greatest gift is knowing that at the end of each day when you are with them at their best, they go back home to bedevil their parents. And you can sit back with a goblet of wine and think how sweet and beautiful they are.