The Morning After

It's difficult to get the blog up and going the day after a big birthday celebration. Heading into its teenage years it's needing a lot of sleep — and getting rather surly about picking up after itself, too. 

So I've spent the morning cleaning up confetti and collecting empty champagne bottles.

These are crucial years ahead, years requiring firmness and guidance. I don't want the blog skidding off the rails. 

I've done this three times before, I tell myself. I can do it again. 😊

 (Photo: Pippx, CC BY 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons. And just for the record, I think this is the first time I've used an emoji in the blog. I won't make a habit of it.)

Outside the Lines

I won't say I wrote the first over-parenting book, but I did write an early one. So I pay attention when new volumes come out on the topic.  One of the latest is Parenting Outside the Lines by Meghan Leary, which is excerpted in the Washington Post today.

Leary has her work cut out for her. The little I've been learning about the commercial assault on and considerable expectations of parents these days, the more amazed I am. Take the products and gadgets that are supposedly filling needs but are actually inflaming fears.

There's something called the Owlet Smart Sock, which keeps tabs on baby's vital signs so you can sleep in peace. Sleep in peace, that is, until baby kicks off the Owlet Smart Sock, at which point you run, heart-pacing, into the nursery to find your sweet babe snoozing in rosy good health. Of course, you're awake for the night.

One thing I'm sure of — every parent wants the best for her child. The question is, how to achieve it. And the infuriating answer is .. we don't really know for sure. Accepting that answer, believing in that answer, can take a lifetime.

Gratitude

Parents need children, I once wrote, because they help them remember what it was like to be coming alive to the world. As a parent to young adults, I will amend that slightly. Parents need children because they remind them what it was like to be ... a young adult. And no matter how wondrous and exciting that can be, it makes me appreciate every creak in my middle-aged body.

What prompts this revelation? Having one daughter return from a four-day music festival, for one thing. Apparently it was difficult to sleep more than a few hours at a time there because the music blared all night. No shade, no quiet, no privacy. No thanks!

And then, from another daughter, a description of her Monday. A double shift at the restaurant: working lunch followed by a two-hour break when she ran and worked out at the gym followed by working dinner. Waitresses are on their feet constantly. I remember because I once was one.

So I head into Tuesday glad that I'm not 19 or 22 anymore. Takes some of the sting out of the day, doesn't it?

(Photo: Claire Capehart)

Twenty-Five

I'm up early, but her birthday has already been underway for nine hours. Her 25th birthday. It's happening in Greenwich Mean Time in the northern reaches of a tall, skinny country in West Africa, and in many ways I'm feeling very far away from Suzanne today.

But in other ways I'm not. I heard her voice less than 48 hours ago and, God willing (a phrase she's begun to use with alarming frequency), I will again later today. I've had two emails recently and, within the past month, a rare and precious letter.

These, for now, will have to do. And I'm left where many parents of 25-year-olds are — to my own devices. Suzanne, after all, is her own person. They all are. And I am mine. Or at least I'm beginning to be again.

So what I think about today is not just that she is a quarter-century old, but that I'm 25 years a parent. Long enough to get the hang of it, you'd think. Not really, though.

(Photo: Katie Esselburn)

Empty and Full

Yesterday we drove Celia, the youngest, a few hours up the road to college. For the first time since we bought this house in 1989, I awoke to no children living in it.

Until this morning the adrenalin carried me along. The list-making and packing, trying to make her transition as smooth as possible. But now the adrenalin is gone. The children are, too.

All the years of other-oriented living, of pushing my own needs aside for theirs, they haven't come to a complete halt, of course, but they have come to a new phase.

I think of those amusement park rides that begin with a slow boat float through a cool tunnel only to shoot riders down a channel of water with a stomach-churning drop and a plume of spray.

What I thought would be easy turned out to be hard. Very hard. And at the end of the ride (the end of one phase of the ride, I should say), I'm exhausted, curious, wistful.

I'm empty — but I'm also full.

The van on the return trip. Those bags are empty — but the car is full.

Sleight of Hand

A month from today Suzanne flies to Benin, West Africa, to begin her Peace Corps assignment. We've known about this for months, but now that we're down to the final weeks it's becoming more and more a reality. The map of Africa isn't the only thing swinging into high relief these days. So is the map of parenthood, the map of life even, if that isn't too melodramatic.

Children are supposed to leave their parents, start lives of their own. This is the natural order of things. I always believed this when I was the child, and I believed it as a parent, too — when my kids were young.  Now I'm having to put my money where my mouth is.

To stave off nervousness I'm concentrating not on how I'll feel when Suzanne takes off and am trying to imagine how she'll feel. It's a parental sleight-of-hand that many of us do unconsciously all the time. It's why we can smile through our tears.

I remember exactly the way I felt when I walked on the tarmac toward the plane that would fly me to Europe for two months backpacking with friends. I had just turned 20 and my whole life — and Europe! — were ahead of me. I felt like I was bouncing off the pavement. I was floating. That's the feeling I'll be trying to conjure up as Suzanne strides toward her future.

Glee

For a large chunk of my professional writing career, I wrote about children. I interviewed experts on crawling and sleeping and temper tantrums. I shared what I learned with the readers of Parents or Working Mother or some other magazine. Then I wrote a book about how too much expert advice can make us crazy. Suffice it to say, I didn't write as much about child rearing after that! But I think about children every day because I have three daughters and because creating a family with Tom continues to be the great adventure of my life.

So this post is about glee. It's about the soundtrack of the TV show Glee, which blared from the car stereo when I drove to Maryland yesterday. Celia and I listen to this when we're driving together, and I've come to love it for that reason. The night before, at a crazy busy restaurant in Herndon, we bought a schmaltzy Austrian accordion CD because we sat next to the Viennese accordion player – and Suzanne is studying in Vienna. And last but not least, as I drove back yesterday from Maryland, I listened to the U.S.-Canada Olympic gold-medal match, because Claire has gotten me excited about ice hockey.

When our children are young, we guide them and shape them; we are their world. As they grow up, they take us into worlds we could not have imagined. They remind us what life was like when we were just coming alive to it. And that, in itself, is reason for glee.