I Liked Saying Goodbye

There’s something wrong with me. That’s been clear for a long time.

I love my kids but when it was time for them to go, it was time for them to go. Goodbye.

The days that we took two out of our four kids to college were possibly the best days of my life. Never mind that one boomeranged back within a year. Buying them new towels, labeling all their stuff with new Sharpies, packing up their canvas bags, God, it was unbelievably lovely. Hauling everything into their little dorm rooms, walking with them back to the car. Saying goodbye? Skipping. That is the only good description. I felt like skipping, double skipping which is skipping with a double hop on one foot signifying extra, extra joy.

So when I see all the literary weeping about the agony of taking beloved children to college, I am in complete wonderment. Why are you sad, you idiots? Do you want them living with you forever?

Do you want them to be small and needy and always standing in front of an open refrigerator complaining about the provisions? Do you want to drive them places and wait in the car, acting like you don’t mind sitting like a fool for two hours while they are ‘enriched’ by their dance lesson or their Hebrew class or whatever it is and your phone goes numb from your incessant Facebook and Twitter checking which you occasionally mix up with reading an article or two from the New York Times? Do you want every dinner conversation to revolve around their latest break-up, SAT score, upcoming driver’s exam, prevention messages you are relaying from the U.S. Office of National Drug Control Policy via the incredibly helpful Talking to Your Teens packet that came in the mail yesterday?

Is this why God put you on this earth? To live the life of Tuck Everlasting, to live forever as we are today? To eternally be parents of children who never grow up?

I read a comment recently, maybe from an article or a Facebook post, not sure and don’t want to search for it, that the writer’s life could only go downhill once the joy of being with their child every day ended and he/she went off to college, that essentially they could never be so happy again as they were with the child by their side. To that I say, that is about the grimmest thing I have ever heard.

Our children are not our personal toys. They are born, they grow, and they go forth. Our job is to help them do each of those things and not to get our identities so wound up in being their parents that we’re emotionally gutted when they leave.

I can’t believe I did this but I just got up, went to my bookshelf and took down the copy of Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet to find his ‘On Children’ piece. At the risk of going all sixties on you, I offer this to all the sobbing parents of children going off to college. It says what I want to say, especially this: For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday. Say goodbye, parents, and revel in it. You helped them get to this point. It’s a victory. Count it and be glad. And say goodbye with a smile.

On Children

Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.

You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow,
which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them,
but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.

You are the bows from which your children
as living arrows are sent forth.
The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite,
and He bends you with His might
that His arrows may go swift and far.
Let your bending in the archer’s hand be for gladness;
For even as He loves the arrow that flies,
so He loves also the bow that is stable.

The Prophet, Kahlil Gibran, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1966