Parenting adults… a parallel journey
It’s been twelve years since our oldest child graduated from high school. In that time, we have found that raising adult children continues to provide both opportunities and challenges we never imagined. Like most folks, we thought we were done as we sounded the fog horn and planned her graduation party. What we’ve found instead, is that parenting never really ends. Instead, it has shifted and changed in both difficult and delightful ways.
Raising adults and navigating a growing family has been the hardest thing I’ve ever done. I learned very early in this process that watching my children move toward adulthood has always included two very different experiences. What is happening in their lives. The beautiful steps toward independence and the faltering beginnings of their lives are appropriate and lovely. At the same time, those very same steps have another effect in my life. Their beginnings also brought about endings for me. I have learned to hold these two very different experiences at the same time.
I first learned this on a college tour with my Allie. We drove hundreds of miles south to tour a beautiful school. Our road trip was filled with music and laughter, the campus was beautiful, and our time was lovely. When it was time for her to pack up her things and head off with an unknown undergraduate for a sleepover, I was left standing in the parking lot alone. I spent that night in a wash of emotion that I was not prepared for. Allie took important first steps that day, and so did I. Our experiences were on a parallel track, and while I could appreciate the beauty of her journey, I also found that I needed to feel the grief and loss of change in mine.
As they have moved into adulthood, this pattern of their experience pressing against my own has become a familiar pattern. My children’s steps into adulthood have touched me in ways I could not have imagined. I watched new jobs, new places, and new people move in and out of their lives, and couldn’t help but overlay my own experiences on top of theirs.
Their growth wrung out my present. It forced me to feel the small and large losses of parenting, as the beautiful people I cherish above all else, moved into the wider world. The everyday losses of adulthood left my ragged and empty. At other times, their steps crashed into my own choices and experiences when I was their age. Every decision they made was played out against the backdrop of my own youth. At times I couldn’t see them, because their now was crashing into my then.
I could not make their way painless and carefree. No matter how hard I tried. Their missteps and vulnerabilities kept me up at night. I worried about them. I spent sleepless nights in prayer. I carried their griefs, fears, and hopes in my own heart. I felt their heartbreak and their fear in my own soul. My heart has held them through these adult years as surely as my body did their early years.
This process has brought me fresh awareness of my own frailty. I grieved again for the young woman I was. I relived my own decisions and failures. I grieved anew over the failures of my own young adulthood. I wondered if my failures had produced theirs. I counseled out of fear and experience and yet they moved forward heedless, just as I had. Each of them, in their own way, has forged a path to adulthood that I would not have chosen for them. They have experienced losses and pain I would have kept them from.
My baby turned twenty-six last week. I think we may be done with the launching years. They all seem to be on good solid paths at this point. We are breathing a sigh of relief. I have no idea what comes next, but I am so grateful for this journey. I wouldn’t have said that in the middle, but from here I can begin to see the ways I have been reshaped by this path. I am softer, and stronger tha I was before. This journey has forged grace deep within my bones. It has also afforded me the chance to hone some strength I did not know I had.
When I look around at moms in the middle of this messy season, my heart bleeds for them. There is nothing easy about launching kids into adulthood. The process requires much more than I ever imagined. It demanded all of me. This process rearranged their lives and mine as well. Their experiences, their questions, their heartache, and their doubt pushed me to examine every part of my life. I am not the same woman who walked into the high school gym all those years ago. I wouldn’t have it any other way.
