I got the first email last month: “As a reminder, as of Dec. 21, 2024, you will no longer be able to access your child’s medical information without permission.”
“As a reminder”? I mean, yeah, sure, of course I knew all of that on some basic level, but this message still felt like more of a wake-up call than a gentle reminder.
After 18 years of calling the pediatrician and the dentist and the orthopedist and the orthodontist; after 18 years of signing permission slips; after 18 years of making decisions on behalf of my child … suddenly, I won’t be able to. My child is no longer a child. My child is somehow, amazingly, an adult.
It went fast. In a primal part of my soul, I can still smell the top of her tiny baby head, feel the heft of her newborn body in my arms, her chin against my shoulder … and yet now she is taller than I am. I still remember, viscerally, having to pin her arms down to wrestle her flailing body into the carseat while she howled … and yet now she drives herself all over town in her beat-up Subaru station wagon. I still remember the stress of deciding whether to try to switch her into a Montessori preschool … and yet now she is getting college acceptance letters.
It went slow. How many nights did I lie beside her in bed, counting her breaths to make sure she was deeply asleep enough that I could get up and clean the kitchen or take a shower? How many times did we read “Love, Elmo” even though I couldn’t stand it and would often “lose” the book for a few nights just to have a reprieve? How many questions did I answer, toddler and teenage tantrums did I endure, hours did I spend driving to summer camp and rehearsals and friends’ houses?
Who on earth decided that it was a workable plan to spend 18 years of your life focusing every particle of your consciousness on keeping this tiny human alive and happy – and then just … send them off into the world? Am I supposed to be OK with this?
I’d been managing to hold it together pretty well, staying calm and upbeat about the future, but for some reason – maybe perimenopause, maybe post-election stress, maybe getting a question from a relative about graduation, maybe a combination of all of the above – I lost my cool the other day and just started crying at a red light, wailing at my daughter, “I’m running out of time to teach you everything you’re supposed to know, like … I don’t know … how to do laundry and use a pay phone and make chicken salad!”
She looked at me the way teenagers look at their parents and said, “I actually know how to do laundry, pay phones don’t exist anymore, and I hate chicken salad.”
All good points, well-made. But still. For 18 years – longer even, since I first found out I was pregnant – every decision I’ve made has been with my child at the forefront of my mind, and now I won’t be making those decisions for her anymore. I trust her to make her own decisions; of course I do. And I know she will still need me; of course she will. But this represents a huge change, a massive shift, and it’s both thrilling and terrifying.
But even as I stare down this huge transition,I’m starting to realize that although I may not have taught her everything, I’ve given her a foundation – a sense of herself, a belief in her own strength, the confidence to figure out where she wants to go and how to get there.
So as December rolls in and the clock ticks down to that official moment when she’s no longer my child in the eyes of the medical and legal world, I’m going to try to shift my focus – not to all the things I didn’t teach her but to all the things she’s already become.
It went fast. It went slow. And somehow, it’s all happening at once.
But we’re both ready for it. (I hope.) And at least I don’t ever have to read “Love, Elmo” ever again.
