Family Life Stories

If, like me, you’ve sent a child off to college and/or have another about to head off, here’s a terrific article on coping with empty-nest syndrome, written by Christine Webber, psychotherapist and life coach, and Dr. David Delvin, GP and family planning specialist.

And here’s an essay about my personal experience coming to terms with my second child’s impending graduation from high school and his inevitable trip, college bound.

He’s kneeling on the beach, the ocean before him, the river his backdrop.  The nontraditional neon plaid shirt he wears suits the green and gold setting for his senior picture, just like he said it would.  I’m holding my son’s senior photo in my hand.

Over my protests at home, before the photo shoot, he refused to wear the button down shirt belonging to his father; he said he needed to look like himself in the photo, not like everyone else in the yearbook.  At the beach the photographer turned the dials on his camera, telling my son to turn this way, tip his chin that way.  Don’t smile too big.  Maybe try a more serious expression.

As I listened to the directions from the man looking through his lens, I realized. A posed and staged image won’t capture the essence of this boy, now a young man.  I wanted this picture to look like all the ones that came before.  And it does.

College applications have been submitted, the dreaded essay has already crossed my desk—my son more than willing to accept his writer-mother’s input—yet it’s as I hold this milestone photograph that I’m stopped in my tracks.

In a matter of months, my youngest child will be leaving home, bound for an as yet determined destination.  The parenting tact I’ve taken the second time around leaves me shaken. The inevitability of his leaving drives me to rummage through my memories and the fabric covered albums and photo boxes.

Degrees in child development, published articles in parenting magazines, national speaking engagements on discipline and I’m no expert at saying this goodbye.

Sinking into my memories now, I find the early photos of my son.  Even then, the corners of his mouth hint at a smile. There’s the one where he’s enthralled with his sister who’s cradling him like one of her cherished baby dolls, his upturned lips and wide eyes remarkable for a child so young.  There’s the one of him at two, laying on top of a wicker basket clinging to a recently laundered blue and white afghan unoriginally called blankie, grinning as if he’d found a long lost friend.

Holding a Fisher Price cassette recorder and microphone, there’s a picture that foreshadows his love of performing.  Picture after picture show him playing the keys.  He’s banging on his grandmother’s piano barely able to sit alone on the bench.  He’s tackling tunes from his beginner songbook on a pink piano on the porch of a summer cottage we once rented, unfazed by the missing keys.  He’s performing at a recital, a community play, a school band concert.

In every picture he’s smiling the smile the photographer asked him to tame.   I dig through more snapshots, lingering over every picture.  A serious one of my son won’t be found in this box or any other.

My parenting strategy for child number two—enjoy everyday moments, don’t look too far ahead—has worked out pretty well.  Though I’ve engaged in healthy doses of worry like every good parent, still, I can honestly say I’ve enjoyed my second child in ways near impossible for a first-time parent.

I didn’t lose sleep about him going to kindergarten, getting on that bus.  I knew his teachers; I volunteered in his school.  The boy with the bubbly personality was ready to ride.  First middle school dance, no worries; he was no wallflower.  By the time he moved up to the high school, I was entrenched  in our community enough to know the pratfalls.  I predicted he would do well, and he’s thrived.

With the countdown on, I plan to enjoy what’s left of his senior year.  I vow not to let the stacks of forms that need to be filled out, or the deadlines for applications and references, or the endless need for checks—always due the next day—to color the swan song of my every day mothering.

As I run my hand over the images that comprise the highlights of the first seventeen years of my son’s life, I fight to stay in the present.  Having launched one child already, a valuable lesson has already been learned.  It will come as no surprise to me that this year will fly by faster than all the others combined.

I close the albums and cover the boxes that contain the best memories of parenting my son, and replace them on the shelf.  I tell myself, this is not the time to betray my live in the moment mantra.  If I spend too much time looking back, I’ll be unmoored by all that is past—what, in reverie, seems like the best of it.  If I look ahead, to this time next year, I will be overcome with missing him.  That smile that is really a laugh, the eyes that open wide when he finds something funny.  The boy, nearly a man, will live somewhere else, not home.  Today I will not go there.

On Wednesday, literary recluse JD Salinger died at the age of 91.  He was the author of one of my favorite novels, Catcher in the Rye.  It’s an iconic story of adolescent angst and alienation,  and if you haven’t read it, now’s the time.

I have fond memories of reading Salinger’s Franny & Zooey in high school.  And this weekend plan to dive into his short story collection, Nine Stories. There’s a lot of online buzz over what will happen to the film rights for Catcher, along with Salinger’s many unpublished works.  Stay tuned for more on this literary genius’s legacy.  For now read Catcher, and prepare to be mesmerized by the voice of Holden Caulfield.

Everyone can call up a story from childhood of being made fun of or of feeling left out.  I know I can.  Today, there’s even less professional supervision around socializing, making the work of navigating friendships tougher for lots of children, not to mention their parents.  When a friend of mine recently lamented about how hard recess is for her school-age daughter, I directed her to this recent Fox Morning News clip, where I offered tips on teaching your child how to handle playground politics.