My Daughter Started High School. I Can’t Stop Crying.

Well, they’re off. Emma starts freshman year of high school this week and Lucas begins eighth grade.

I’m mostly speechless. There’s this big lump in my throat and a throbbing pain in my heart and I can’t seem to stop crying. I miss it when they were little and they each had little Pottery Barn backpacks with their names etched on them. I even bought them matching lunch boxes that strapped on to the personalized backpacks. I couldn’t really afford to buy such nice school gear, but I didn’t care. They were adorable and my children were adorable and it all went together beautifully.

Now, they wear the clothes they want, scoff at the Pottery Barn backpacks, and keep getting older. They talk about what they want to do when they grow up, and it looks like they are actually going to grow up. What felt like a life-time away, now feels like tomorrow. Oh, to hold back time.

The summer arrived with beautiful gusto, and ends with quiet reflection, almost like a Selah. Yesterday, the four of us went sailing. Lucas and John jumped into the lake and Olive dove in after them.

Emma steered the boat. As we coached her, she discovered how to catch the wind. The boat glided across the rippling water with ease under her hand, and that is the metaphor of mothering. Teach them how to catch the wind, and they will sail away across the rippling waters. We think we have so much control and power, but we don’t.

In the end, parenting is all about helping them find their very own wind and raise their very own sails. It’s about coaching them to be quiet enough to feel where the breeze has shifted, and brave enough to trust their instincts so they might fly across the waters of life.

It’s about love.

It’s about catch and release.

It’s about believing in them, especially when they don’t believe in themselves.

Parenting is about getting out of the way.

It’s about money: helping them save it, and letting them spend yours.

It’s about trust. Trusting God to see them through, and trusting them to remember everything you tried to teach them, and also secretly hoping they’ll forget all the bad stuff you did.

Parenting is about empathy and powerlessness. You feel their deepest pain, and can hardly do a single thing to solve it. But goodness, you feel it with a kind of breadth that is all-consuming.

It’s about honor. Teaching them to honor you, and learning how to honor them.

It’s about mistakes and new tomorrows. It’s about tiny hands reaching out to yours in the middle of the night, and waking one day to realize their hands now steady you.

It’s about goodness and all that is whole and beautiful in this world.

It’s about chocolate chip cookies and milk, and macaroni and cheese. It’s about dreams and laughter, broken hearts, and late night chats.

Parenting is exhausting and infuriating, pure torture and sheer joy. It’s exhilarating and humbling.

It is the one thing I really want to be good at, and the only thing that consistently brings me to my knees. Oh God, help. I can’t do this without you. 

Parenting is a great gift, one that is ever shifting, always changing, and never ending. 

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