As I watched my youngest leave home this morning for his first day of High School, I felt a tender tugging in my heart.
Add to this that my older son has just started first year of College half a province away, and I was aware of a poignantly mixed bag of emotions within me. Even as I feel a little sadness that my parenting of young ones is over, I celebrate the young men these guys are becoming. Although I need to step back and let them fly, I know that this is also time for ME to fly a little. Now that some of what has held me anchored to earth is no longer holding me.
Although I get fewer hugs these days from busy young men, I also have less responsibility in their day-to-day lives. They are choosing who they are now, how they live their lives. I can guide, but not command. I can hand over more to them and trust them to make good decisions.
Perhaps the question for me as a parent is not so much, “Who do you want to be when you grow up?” but “Who AM I now that THEY are growing up?”
For 20 years the role of mother has figured so largely in my life. And now, suddenly, it shifts.
Every new experience means the end of something as we enter into the next phase or experience. To celebrate my own new-found freedom I went to the gym this morning before work, as soon as high-school-son left for school. A first for me.
Imagine… an hour to myself on a weekday morning.
Every beginning is an ending of some kind. Every ending opens new possibilities, new experiences. The only real constant is Change.
I ask myself: can I write that book I have been gestating in my heart for 20 years? Teach a workshop? Take a pottery class?
The tenderness of my feelings today reminds me that most things in life are a mixed bag. In the hard times are new beginnings waiting to unfold, in the Celebration of Life’s milestones we honour Change as a constant.