My oldest is going away for five weeks this summer. On her own. In a city. In a BIG city. Without us. Sure she’ll be supervised and in groups and has to check in and out. But.
Even when I don’t let the mom anxiety of being a parent of a teen overwhelm me (yes I have her on Life360), I am still nervous. Not about her, but about the world and all the cruel or horrible people in it. Even more than the scary unknown of the world, it’s the little things I can’t do. I won’t be there at night to dry her tears. I won’t be picking her up at the end of the day and have that time to talk. She’ll have to get herself to and from her program. Make her own meals. Get her own groceries. Do her own laundry. Deal with roommates she has never met before.
I want to insert the horror-faced emoji here.
I know she can do it. But I also want to be there to dry her tears, if there are any. I want to hear about her day in person and be able to read her face to know if she’s holding anything back or hiding feelings over something. I want to be there to make sure she eats some healthy food and doesn’t put her blue jeans in the wash with a white shirt and keeps track of her beach towel and doesn’t forget her umbrella if it looks like rain.
This is when it gets hard, mamas. You’ve had your chance to raise a baby and raise a child. Now you’re raising an adult. And it’s terrifying. These years have really, really big consequences. And it’s really, really, hard to not want to still protect them from mismatched clothes, lost socks, and burned EGGOs and well, life, every step of the way, because for more than a decade that’s what you have been doing.
You’ve helped them on the stairs and helped them brush their teeth and showed them how to tie their shoes, forced green food on their plate if not in their body, and taught them how to peel a banana, and now, well. They have to do it on their own. I know she can do all these things. I am confident she can wash her clothes and feed herself with the colander we got at Target, and not lose her brand-new retainers and get to the grocery store and use her brand-new bank card to buy something other than pure sugar. Still.
I think what I am most scared of is my heart while she’ll be gone.
I’ll miss her.
