“Good parents give their children Roots and Wings. Roots to know where home is,
wings to fly away and exercise what's been taught them.”
-- Jonas Salk.
8-26-09
Tomorrow we take our oldest son to college. Hard to believe 18 years have flown by. There he is last spring in Durango, Colorado visiting Fort Lewis College where he will begin next Monday. He is so ready. He even packed himself! I’ll write about the experience of saying good-bye when we return.
Max pointing to his room
at Cooper Hall
9-4-09
We had wonderful, 6 hour drive through the beautiful mountains to Durango. We arrived easily at the Fort Lewis campus and had no trouble finding his new dorm, Cooper Hall. We helped him carry everything up and met his very nice roommate. Then the first of many independent moves by him. We asked him how we could help unpack. He said, “I’ll unpack myself.” Being the Zen parents we’ve become over the last year, we offered to meet him in an hour at the orientation. I waited to maybe feel a little disappointment. But no, we were both thrilled. This was just one of many signs we received over the weekend that he is ready and that we have done a great job, helping him to become an independent child, no not child, a young man.
Fort Lewis put on a great, 2 1/2 day orientation and gave us many important tips about what we may be going through. Parents may feel:
• worry about how their child will perform in classes.
• worry about what the students may be doing at night.
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•loneliness or joy - you will probably feel both!
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•Some parents may even feel envious that they did not have the same opportunities to attend college.
Parents must let their students go. Some ways to let go are:
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•to be tolerant of their mistakes...they will definitely make a few!
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•to be a supportive and listening parent and not a helicopter parent or the authority figure type.
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•to allow them to make their own decisions.
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•to accept them as they are.
My mother sent me this wonderful poem on letting go (here’s an except):
“To Let Go is not to care for, but to care about.
To Let Go is not to fix but to be supportive.
To Let Go is not to judge but to allow another to be a human being.
To Let Go is not to be in the middle of arranging all outcomes,
but to allow others to effect their own destinies.
To Let Go is not to be protective, but to permit others to face reality.
To Let Go is to fear less, and to love more.”
~Author unknown
I’ve noticed all these emotions are the same emotions that the new mothers of our preschool are feeling as they get ready to bring us their young 3 and 4 year olds. They exhibit many of the same feelings. Some feel elation, some fear, some loneliness. They are not sure what the reaction of their children will be when they leave. You want your child to miss you. Yet you want him or her to be happy and independent as well.
I had no idea what to write about Max leaving until he had left. Isn’t that the way a lot of life is? You don’t know what to expect at each stage for your children, whether it’s preschool, kindergarten, middle school, high school or college; it’s the not knowing what is going to happen that makes the fear. We don’t know what life is all about until an event has happened. As I work on letting go, I know that only then can I stop worrying and be closer then to my children!
“Life can only be understood backward,
but it must be lived forward.”
~Soren Kierkegaard
