Sorry to be such a downer, but I’ve been struggling with something as unavoidable as death and taxes this week. My children are now old enough to be away from home without me. I can see the value in them learning independence from their parents—most often from their poor old dad—but each absence is another reminder of what is to come.
The latest disappearance is my eldest daughter’s trip to “Brontë Country” with a friend's family. This is a laudable endeavor; she is studying Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre at school, so the chance to visit the land of Emily and Charlotte in Yorkshire, England, will do her good. She’s 15, so she, rather than her 12-year-old sister, has been the one most often away from home.
But even the younger one had her first week away from her parents this year, on a school vacation. As the Hall & Oates song goes, “Every time you go away, you take a piece of me with you." Seeing my daughters grow up into smart, funny, mature young women is a privilege, but I also remember what a privilege it was to raise them. Looking back at the years before middle school, it feels like paradise now.
Today I face a new challenge. It’s my next job—and the job of every parent—to come to terms with their children separating themselves and finding their own way: their own lives, opinions, dreams and identities. I’m OK with all that, but I’m struggling to work out what my purpose will be as they slowly drift away.
My wife and daughters went on vacation with some friends earlier this summer too, leaving me alone for a week. Whenever this happened in the past, I always enjoyed it as I got to slow down and do a few things for myself (what to Kurosawa and Bergman or Rocky IV and Team America: World Police?), but this time it filled me with trepidation. Could I make sense of the world without my family around?
I think I failed, to be honest. But at least it got me thinking about how I might succeed one day. I knew that my relationships with my daughters had to evolve.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
