All over this country, mothers and fathers are having “anticipatory grief”…knowing we are in the latter half of August. Soon kindergartners will leave their mothers for school…some can hardly wait to use their new knapsacks and tuck into school. Soon, new high school graduates will be packing up their suitcases and going off to college.
The confusion of these “sending offs” is immense for parents, as parents celebrate the milestone that has been reached, and mourn at the decreasing role and contact in the child’s life. It’s hard and wonderful all at the same time.
I read this in the latest edition of the Psychotherapy Networker, about a father looking forward to going to a baseball game with his daughter…the one soon to leave for college, and she lets him know she’s prefer to go with her friends on her own:
“Is that OK?” she asked, her head tilting, birdlike, watching me intently, as she’s always done. How does one answer such a question? By this stage of life, every parent knows that there isn’t one answer, but two. The first is the one that you reveal to her, the one that’s short and kind and clean: “Of course it’s OK. Have a great time. I hope the Orioles win.”
The second answer is the longer one; the one that’s more accurate, but more devastating: “It’s certainly not OK. It’s not OK for you to grow up and leave me behind. It’s not OK for you to hurt me, even if you don’t mean to, even if you must—and I know you must. It’s not OK for you to shove me out of the bright center of your life and into the twilight of insignificance. It’s not OK for you to remind me that time doesn’t stand still, that there’s a distant drumbeat of mortality that begins to pound ever so slightly louder with each child that departs. The Orioles may win; but, tonight, all I feel is loss. No, no, no; it’s not OK!”
In every love relationship, there are the words we choose to speak to our beloved and the words that must remain unspoken out of love. We keep these words to ourselves, smile gamely as our children voyage forth into the world—just as we asked them to do, just as we taught them to do, just as we want them to do. And as they go, our hearts break a little, and our souls sink a little as we wave good-bye…
Brad Sachs
I so get the struggle about wanting to be authentic with those that I love…what do I do with the thoughts that I think and feel but aren’t helpful for the other? I like the line that I bolded…to be real and vulnerable with loved ones, but recognizing there are times when there needs to be some careful editing as part of that “realness”. In the above example, it is a very real act of authentic love to say, “Of course, it’s OK”…because, really, IT IS. There are layers…and there are times when sharing those layers isn’t authentic to what you really want the other to feel and to know about you.
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