This is about change, loss, and the baseball game I didn't go to.
Our youngest daughter has entered her final year of high school and is busily applying to college. My wife and I are not new to launching children-our eldest son has already finished his undergraduate degree and started a family, our middle son just began his junior year of college.
While each of these launches had its own, unique emotional trajectory, there was still an important similarity that linked the two. With each leavetaking, there was still at least one child left behind for us to parent. Despite the storms of thunderous silence that temporarily roared through the house as each son soared away, it was clear that there was still plenty of parenting to be done, and my attention turned fairly quickly from deep feelings of loss to doggedly fulfilling those paternal duties.
With this next departure that looms on the horizon, however, with this concluding flight, the nest more fully and more finally empties, and that deafening silence will not so easily fill.
It is for these reasons that a complicated admixture of both poignancy and urgency slowly has begun to overtake me. I have been blessed with an enduring marriage, and three wonderful children, and I cherish my relationship with each one of them. It was of course that closeness that made those initial two departures such bittersweet ones, that stirred the melancholy that braided with the great pride I took in my sons' accomplishments and their capacity to navigate their way forward.
The impending leavetaking, of course, feels different. Part of this is due to Jessica being my only daughter. I will not bore you with the range of interests, activities, jokes and rituals that she and I have grown to share and treasure over the years, but suffice it to say that the two of us are very close, that we seem to be "built" the same way emotionally, and that her birth came at a very good time in our lives.
Our two sons were both quite a handful in their early years, and so we were actually taken aback when our daughter entered the world with a sense of calm, with an emotional balance and integrity, that was intensely gratifying. Aside from the fact that it took her several years to master the art of sleeping through the night, and a little longer than expected to be toilet trained, there was an ease to raising her that was wholly unanticipated and profoundly satisfying.
And, I feel fortunate to be able to say, it has pretty much remained that way for the past 17 years. She is smart, she is funny, she is sensitive, she is talented, and, although I am surely biassed, she is quite beautiful. This is someone who will surely leave a significant cavity behind when she determinedly marches forth into her future.
Last night the three of us went shopping for the clothes that she will need for her upcoming senior year internship. Walking up and down the department store aisles, I could not help noticing the hundreds of dorm-room items that were for sale, and realizing with a start that, at this time next year, those are the shelves that we would most likely be selecting from.
I could also not help but watch and study, with a combination of fascination and longing, the customers who clustered around those shelves. I have personally been journeying through the landscape of family life for more than two decades, now, and yet each stage consistently intrigues me. So these days, there is a certain choreography between parent and young adult that I find to be particularly touching-these were not the distracted, impatient, overwhelmed mothers and fathers of squalling infants or cantakerous toddlers, of fidgety children or sullen, snarky adolescents.
By now, those relational rough edges have largely been smoothed out, and the parent-child dance has calmed and softened, displaying a certain awkward grace that is both hard won and somewhat easy to manage. Yet there is a restlessness that can be detected nevertheless, a sense that this current equilibrium, pleasant and functional as it may be, is temporary-the world is beginning to tilt, a sea change is about to occur, and both generations know it and sense it, but there is absolutely nothing to be done about it.
When we arrived home from shopping, I got the mail and discovered the envelope containing the proofs of my daughter's high-school graduation pictures, taken several weeks before. I flipped through them and gasped at the picture of her in a cap and gown, smiling radiantly, confidently holding the fake diploma. As parents, we all have these startling moments, moments when we view our child through a different lens and all of a sudden we realize that she is no longer who she was. Which means, of course, that we are no longer who we were. We live our lives struggling to deny our awful susceptibilities, until confronted with what we are most susceptible to-the inexorable, irreducible passage of time.
As I write this, there is exactly one week of summer vacation left before her senior year begins. This morning, I left my daughter a note before I headed out to work, suggesting that we go to a baseball game, with or without any friends she wanted to invite, probably the last time we'd be able to go this season. When I checked in with her mid-day by phone and asked if she was interested, she politely declined, not sounding particularly interested. When I arrived home at the end of the day, she told me that she in fact wanted to go to the game-my heart lifted exuberantly-but not with me...with two of her friends.
"Is that okay?" she asked, her head tilting, birdlike, watching me intently, as she has always done. How does one answer such a simple three-word question? By this stage of life, every parent knows that there is not one answer, but two. The first is the one that you reveal to her, the one that is short and kind and clean: "Of course it's okay, have a great time, I hope the Orioles win."
The second answer is the longer one, the one that is more accurate, but more devastating: "It is certainly not okay. It is not okay for you to grow and leave me behind. It is not okay for you to hurt me, even if you don't mean to, even if you must-and you must. It is not okay for you to push me out of the center of life and out towards its margins. It is not okay for you to remind me that time does not stand still, that there is a distant drumbeat of mortality that begins to pound ever so slightly louder with each child that departs. The Orioles may win, but, tonight, all I feel is loss. No, no, no, it is not okay."
But in every love relationship, there are the words that we choose to speak to our beloved, and there are the words that, out of our deep love, must remain unspoken. And so we keep these words sealed in our private vault, and we smile bravely as our children voyage forth into the world, just like we asked them to do, just like we taught them to do, just like we need them to do.
And as they do so, our hearts cannot but break a little, and our souls cannot but sink a little, and we wave goodbye and watch their car pull away, watch the red taillights slowly grow smaller and smaller and eventually disappear in the dusk until all that's left for us is the yellowed moon, the tender breeze, and the wistful, wishful chirring of the late summer cicadas.
