Letting Go

Early Autumn in Algonquin

Think back about a decade: one of my sons is off to summer camp for the first time.  I'm excited for him and we have a great drive together down to North Carolina, enjoying the blue of the Blue Ridge Mountains.  I return home full of plans for all that I intend to accomplish in the next few weeks.  Anyone with more than one child knows that the work involved both increases and decreases in geometric proportion to the number of children present.  The housework and attentiveness required in connection with three children drops dramatically when one of them is absent, even for a day.  Three weeks?  I could run the entire nation.

So what did I do for that three week period?  Mostly I sat at the kitchen table, moping and waiting for the mail.  I got about five or six letters, every one of them a gem.  ("Dere Mom, a skunk and here babys cam to the 4th of july firworkes.") I did not clear out the attics or basement or do exciting things with the other two.  I just waited, miserably, for my child to return. 

And return he did.  He did not drown in the lake, or fall off a mountain, or get lost in a cave.  He came home grinning and healthy -- a tad homesick, too, with vows not to go back, which he forgot all about within a few weeks.

I got better at letting them go.  Within a couple of summers, all three children were at camp; a few more years, and that first one was off to Europe to live.  Now two of them are 20 and back at college.

I don't miss them as agonizingly as I did my oldest that first summer.  I think about them several times a day, and before I fall asleep at night and as soon as I wake up in the mornings.  I'm interested in everything about their lives -- in far more than they want to share.  I'm already planning Thanksgiving.  But on the whole, I'm happy for them.  We have experienced enough heartbreak in our family and among our friends since that first long-ago camp summer that I am well aware of how fortunate each of them is to be able to go to college as a reasonably well-functioning young adult.

What I miss now is the family life that once was.  When your children are little, older mothers frequently tell you to pay attention, to enjoy those years, to recognize how fleeting they are.  Hey, I told myself all that all the time.  My own childhood was so truncated that I knew well to be appreciative each day of the renewed chance mothering gave me to recover what I had lost.

But it wasn't enough.  I guess it never is.  It's hard now for me to believe that I once lived a life in which days were spent pushing swings and wiping up juice spills, and evenings supervising baths and teeth-brushing, and then reading aloud to three little ones heaped on my bed in their fuzzy and footed sleepers.  Their wolf-den days are over -- at least until they have children of their own.

Ahhh....there's the solution.  Not too soon, of course, for them -- but not soon enough for me.