Fleeting
John Updike once said of writing that it can’t be taught, but it can be learned. This is how I’ve come to feel about parenting. I have three daughters and this year I will become an empty nester. My youngest birdie will leave me this fall and head for college and places unknown.
My baby is seventeen and up til a few months ago, used to come in ritual each night before bedtime, plop down on my bed, interrupting my reading or TV watching and snuggle in my arms. She is beyond the age when most kids do this (but I’ve learned you can snuggle a child that is five-foot-nine). Certainly my other two quit the habit long before this time.
The weaning was gradual. So subtle, like the changing of the seasons, as to not notice at first. It crept up on me. What was ten minutes of my holding her, or she laying on my shoulder and watching TV with me, or my stroking her long hair for a fleeting moment, turned into quick pecks on the cheek, goodnights from the hallway, sometimes even a text from her phone, not even retreating from her bedroom to say goodnight. No snuggling— just my iPad lighting up with, “G’nite mom.”
Like most things, when you’re in it, you don’t fully appreciate what you have until it’s gone. And it is gone. Just like that, poof, a new season. It’s over. She doesn’t snuggle me anymore and never will. It’s bittersweet this process. And at times unimaginable. For parenting is the only job where if you do it right, you’ve raised them to one day leave you.
Other times it’s exhilarating, time moves much too fast, and you can see what’s slipping away. Some losses show up bold and hard, other times, like with snuggling, there’s that weaning— thank God for weaning.
But in the end, while I may talk about loss and love with detail, I don’t expect anyone to really understand. It’s one of those things in life that can’t be taught, but can be learned. In order to feel it, it must be lived.
THOUGHT FOR THE DAY
“For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks…the work for which all other work is but preparation.”
-Ranier Maria Rilke
© Julie Krug 2020