About 10 years ago, I saw a meme on Facebook that said, “One day you will put your child down for the last time and never pick them up again. You won’t know it’s the last time when you do it, so cherish every moment.”
At the time, I think I probably thought, “Good! My arms are so tired!”
And they were. A decade ago, I had a 7-year-old and a 2-year-old, and my 7-year-old still wanted to be carried to be, and my 2-year-old was only happy on my hip. I was not cherishing – physically and emotionally could not cherish – every moment.
I still occasionally pick up my 12-year-old – it’s not the easiest task, but it’s technically still doable – but my 17-year-old is taller than I am and while I’m sure I could manage to pick her up if she were in the path of a falling anvil or something, I definitely don’t carry her to bed anymore.
Honestly, that’s fine with me. There are so many things about parenting young kids that I don’t miss: having to eat my dinner cold at a restaurant because I couldn’t sit down; carrying a howling, kicking toddler out of Target; answering the nonstop questions; reading the same inane bedtime stories again and again and again; cleaning puke out of the crevices of a rear-facing car seat.
But now we are headed into dangerous territory because there are so many things I love about parenting older kids … and I’m about to leave that phase, too.
My older daughter, Rowan, turns 18 in December and will be off to college next fall, so I’ve already experienced the last first day of school. (And yes, I cried.) I’ve turned in my last set of her required school re-registration forms. I’ve booked her last pediatric checkup.
Next up, we have: her last school picture, her last Halloween at home, our last Trader Joe’s pumpkin season celebration (where we go and buy everything pumpkin-related in the store), her last Mardi Gras, her last Jazz Fest, her last school musical, her last speech and debate competition, her last round of high school exams – and then her first graduation.
To say I’m not ready is both true and untrue.
I am not really emotionally ready. She has been my whole world for almost 18 years. Every decision I made, from the moment I found out I was pregnant, had her at the forefront. What I ate, what I drank, where I lived, what jobs I took … Of course, I still have my younger kid, who is also my whole world and whose well-being is still going to inform my decision making, but having 50% fewer kids at home definitely shifts the calculus.
But I am ready in the sense that I know this is the next right step for her. I want her world to expand. I want her to see other parts of the world and meet people who will change her life. Although I fully acknowledge that I will be a ball of nervous energy, with bitten nails and a constant stomachache, while we wait for her final college decision, I also feel confident that she will end up at the school that is right for her in the fall. And I’m so excited for the next part of her life to begin.
It’s just beyond bittersweet that the next part of her life might be in Washington state or North Carolina or Colorado or even New York City.
I kind of feel like it was just a month or so ago that I was peeling her off my leg to get her into her pre-K classroom or snuggling with her in her fleecy footie pajamas when she had a cold or combing snarls out of her hair while she watched slime videos on YouTube. I’m genuinely not sure how it all went so fast, regardless of how many warnings I got from well-meaning people about how fast it all goes.
“The good thing about parenting is,” my late mother told me years ago, “is that the bad things don’t last. But the bad thing is that the good things don’t last either.”
But I also remember calling my mother at 4:30 a.m. the first time Rowan, at probably 9 months old, got a crazy-high fever, and I was sobbing and absolutely frantic.
“When does this get easier?!” I wailed over the phone.
“Well,” she said, slowly waking up, “you’re 27 and you’re calling me crying at 4:30 in the morning, so I guess I would have to say … never?”
Honestly, it depressed me at the time, but now it gives me hope.
I know parenting an adult child will be different but knowing that it never ends makes me feel oddly better.
There might be a “last time” for a lot of events, but she will always, always be my baby.
