Learning to Become a Water Net

 "Parenting is easy," remarked the pediatrician we were interviewing prior to the birth of our daughter. "You get through the first two months, the terrible twos, the teenage years and you are done!" he joked. This week after having dropped off our daughter at college, I can say maybe parenting is done, but being a parent is most certainly not done. We walked away feeling very happy and excited for her as she is going to a place she really wanted to and we hope it lives up to her expectations, but at the same time we are saddened as we returned to our empty nest. Her old jacket lying on the floor (never hung up) caused a mini-flutter within me and I was expecting to hear her hollering "Mom! Where is my [insert whatever object comes to your mind]?." While I still expect a few hollering texts from across the country over the next few weeks as she settles down into a routine, it is not going to be the same, and I will miss the hollering from across the room.

I don't know which one was more nerve-wracking - bringing her home after birth or dropping her off a couple of thousand miles away for college. In the former case, the fear of being entirely responsible for a helpless new babe was at times terrifying. In the latter, accepting that I am no longer responsible for her and she has to take charge of her own reins is going to take some time for me to get used to. Don't get me wrong, we are lucky to have a child who is very reasonable, responsible, with great instincts and intuition. She has striven to remain authentic throughout her entire 18 years even if that meant swimming against the current most of the time, a quality that I admire in her the most.

So while I have no doubts that she is well-equipped for this solo-flight I will miss having a ringside view to this journey. I know that she will keep us in the loop but I will miss our daily evening walk when she would give me the run down of her day or sometimes brainstorm ideas for a piece she was writing.

She was late to the world of mobile phones, getting one only towards the end of her 8th grade. Maybe that's why she enjoys conversations and is a terrible texter - a characteristic that we loved when she lived with us and might come back to bite us now. She also never once asked us for our Netflix password because she rarely watched TV by herself. I have watched every show with her from My Little Pony, Littelest Pet Shop, Dragons Race to the Edge, Ninjago, when she was little all the way to the latest seasons of The Dragon Prince and Witcher, this summer. From Endeavor to Only Murders in the Building  half the fun of watching these shows was us figuring out together who the murderer could be. Every summer we would watch Avatar the Last Airbender from start to finish and still find things to discuss about the show. These past few years of high school meant we didn't have as much time as we would have liked to play board games together but we made the best of this summer and I think she is going to find newer, sharper companions than her old mom to match up against.

Yes I am realizing that I am selfishly moaning the loss of a way of life for me that has become a pattern these past 18 years. But it's been only 4 days and it is going to take time for both of us to get into new routines. One of the advantages of a long distance relationship is that I will be physically restricted from problem-solving for her - a tendency of mine that she has often pointed out as not being very helpful. Many times she has asked me to just listen and not jump to problem-solving. So I am going to put a positive spin on the distance of separation and the time zone difference and say it is going to help me practice listening when she is venting instead of trying to jump the gun. 

Robin Wall Kimmerer reminds us that fortunately our daughters are not our clones and we don't have to disintegrate to set them free. Instead she suggests we think of ourselves as water-nets. She says "A fish net catches fish, a bug net catches bug. But a water net catches nothing ... Mothering is like that, a net of living threads to lovingly encircle what it cannot possibly hold, what will eventually move through it." We are empty-nesters as of today, but that is an image that is not very helpful to me. So from now on if anyone asks me how it feels I am going to say I am not an empty-nester but just a novice water-net.