Raising Kids to Let Them Go

My mom will have been dead 10 years in September.  My kids were 9, 6, and almost 4 when she left us, and as a young mom, I thought I would be okay because I figured I had the parenting thing under control.  My kids were well-adjusted, polite, inquisitive, and kind.  I knew I would miss her, but I thought I would miss her most at parties and holidays and babysitting.  I thought there wasn't much more she could teach me because parenting in the 2000s was so much different than the 1970s and 80s.

We had already had our spats about why I limited my kids' cartoon watching.  "I never limited how many cartoons you all watched," she had stated.  True, but when we were kids, there wasn't a whole network devoted to cartoons that ran 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.  Our cartoons were Scooby Doo and Bugs Bunny and Tom and Jerry (after school from 3-6 and on Saturday mornings until noon), not The Fairly Odd Parents and The Simpsons and Dexter's Laboratory.

And video games.  Sheesh!  We had Atari with Pac-Man and Donkey Kong and pixelated frogs trying to get across a busy road.  I had to worry about my kids going to someone's house where an older sibling was shooting policemen and raping unsuspecting women and dropping F-bombs all in graphic detail on their 48 inch plasma screen tv.

And then there were cell phones.  Facebook.  Texting.  Instant messaging.  Instagram.  Snapchat.  Twitter.  Vine.  The list goes on.  My mom would have been no help at all in wading through the cesspool that is social media, I thought.  Except that she was.  She had raised me to be a decent, caring, responsible person who behaved when no one was looking and did the right thing because it was expected.  And even though she was gone, her influence on me, and thus, my children, came down through the decades.  I have the same expectations of my kids that my mom had of me, and for the most part, they rise to the occasion.

These middling years, figuring it out on my own how to get the kids through as unscathed as possible, has been challenging, but I think I'm doing an okay job.  We've had some detours and a few bumps in the road, but we are on track for some responsible, well-adjusted adults heading out on their own to make their ways in life.

And this is where I realize that I could really use my mom right now, because how in the world do you let your kids go?  It doesn't matter if you are a 19th century mother sending your son west on horseback across the Allegheny Mountains or a mother in Ireland watching your daughter sail to America with all she owns in a brown leather trunk or a Kentucky mom leaving your daughter on the steps of her  boyfriend's house in the middle of Central Texas while you head the 1000 miles back home.

Mom and me, on one of her first trips to visit me in Texas, fall 1991.

How do you let go?

Because that is the way it's supposed to be, right?  I'm supposed to raise my kids and send them off to live lives of their own making, hopefully happy, productive lives, but their lives nonetheless.

So when I hear Kyle say he wants to leave Kentucky and go to Chicago or New York or Germany, I have to be open to that.  When I hear Claire, two years left here at home, talk about colleges in California or Pennsylvania or Tennessee, my job is to help facilitate that, to make sure that she is equipped to fly and then watch her sail into the distance.  When I think of Emily as the last child at home, probably for only 5 more years, I feel panic rise and have to take some deep breaths.  The time with them is slipping through my fingers like sand, and  I have to remind myself that my job as a mother is to raise my kids and set them free.  If I do a good job, then they leave because I have equipped them with the skills and confidence to lead lives of worth and value.

But damn it's hard.  It's hard to create these beautiful creatures that I love with every fiber of my being and then let them go.  They are my joy.  My life.  And I want to ask my mom, "How do you do it???  How did you let me go?  How did you physically get in the car and drive away?" I remember the deep sense of loss I felt as a daughter watching the car turn the corner and disappear, but now that I'm a mother, I just cannot imagine leaving my child to a life of her choosing, so far away from me.

So even though Mom would be no help with much of what I deal with as a parent today, I really wish I could ask her how to let go, because I just don't know how I will be able to do it.

The kids and me.  New Orleans, January 2015.