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Tomorrow morning, I leave Chapel Hill with my oldest son in tow, transporting Will to Boston where he will begin the next chapter in his life: college. Talk about a major plot point! In the life of a child and a parent, this is a huge one.
Joseph Campbell talked about all stories essentially telling one story: The Hero’s Journey. For Will, this transition is all about the future, possibilities, new experiences, leaving the ‘ordinary world’ of home — family and friends — and transitioning into an ‘extraordinary world’ where hopefully he’ll find a new ‘family’ and new friends, his own hero’s journey.
For parents? What can we do but embrace that? After all, much of our energy has been focused on supporting our sons and daughters in their quest for this ‘new’ life.
And yet as a parent, so much of our private thoughts and emotions reach back in time — to other big plot points: birth, first words, first steps, sleepless nights waiting for fevers to break, biting one’s tongue on the sidelines of countless soccer games, the daily miracle of a child becoming a multi-faceted individual.
They grow. And we must set them free. Yet somehow live with that emptiness upon their leaving.
It is an exquisite pain, one of those remarkable heightened moments in a human life where the beauty of love and loss, hope and regret do a solemn, sweeping dance, and all we can do, as parents, is stumble along, trying our best to subsume the feelings we have in order to allow our sons and daughters to experience the profundity of this sudden freedom, openness, and opportunity.
This moment is not about us. It is about them.
So to all you parents who have traveled this path before, I salute you. I did not really know what you experienced until this time in my own life.
And to all you parents who still have your children in your ‘nest,’ what can one say but the obvious: cherish the moments.
Hitchcock said, “Movies are life with the dull parts cut out.”
When a parent says goodbye to a child, that’s when we realize — there are no dull parts.