Fledging
Graduation weekend is upon us. We knew it was coming, but the flood of emotions, the unique combination of specific, intense feelings keeps surprising me. I was at the store, reaching for a jar of jelly that my oldest son loves and this wave of sadness and joy and confusion and grief and love just came out of nowhere. Do I keep buying this jelly when he moves out? He’s really the only one that eats it… but if I stop getting it, what if he comes over and wants some jelly? Things like this keep popping up this year. Especially now that it’s May. What do we do with his room? His brothers have been circling like vultures, but he’s going to come visit, right?
In some ways this situation is so typical of my whole parenting experience. I get so focused on surviving one stage of raising kids that I find myself on the cusp of the next stage totally unprepared. It’s like I finally took a breath and relaxed and now I’m behind again and scrambling. Circumcision? Vaccines? School!? Neurodivergence? Driving? Sex??? It’s just. So. Much. And every stage that you parent a child through, you get to reassess your own experience. How did my parents handle this? Do I want to do this the same way? I get to decide and sometimes that is wonderful and then other times I feel so inept. I choose not to listen to that little voice. Instead, I try to remind myself of how much I’ve learned and grown and accomplished. When that doesn’t seem to work, I lean on my community. Who has been through this, who do I trust, who are the smartest, most capable people I know? Maybe they can help me figure this out? And when that doesn’t help, I pull out the big guns. This is where my spiritual practice comes in clutch. I often think of Ann Lamott saying that the two best prayers she knows are “Help me, help me, help me and Thank you, thank you, thank you.” Those do seem to work pretty well for me.
And now that I find myself at the proverbial finish line (not really) and preparing to fledge my first kid from the nest, I’m finding myself expressing so much gratitude to my invisible team. What a gift and joy to get to parent this kid and witness him learn who he is and how he wants to be. What a blessing and privilege to be able to have raised him the way I had hoped to. What a relief to be able to say and believe that I know he’s going to be ok and he is so ready.
