Today we woke up, made the girls breakfast, packed a lunch and a backpack, and drove 12 minutes up the road to walk our five-year-old into her kindergarten classroom and on to the rest of her life. Maggie cried. Susie cried. I cried. Everyone cried.
Of course I’m excited for Maggie to learn new things and meet new friends and be stretched and challenged so that she can grow. She is going to thrive in a school environment, and even more in a magnet school that is designed to challenge her and push her beyond what she can handle on her own. I get the sense that if her teachers can get her to stop trying to help teach the classes, they are going to love her.
Mostly though, I feel sad, and for all the reasons you would expect a father sending his firstborn off to kindergarten to feel sad, I think.
Sending Maggie to kindergarten reminds me that she is not mine.
When Susie and I dropped her off earlier today, I came home feeling a little less like a parent. I’m not, of course, but it does feel that way.
Letting go is tough. But when we let go—for kindergarten, college, marriage, or anything in between—we graduate to a different stage of parenthood that may require less of our time but more of our hearts, as if we could give more than we do already. This is the ever-increasing tension that comes as we stretch into new phases of parenting, and it feels like my heart is enduring dozens of tiny tears as it stretches.
It’s too quiet in the house—I can’t tell you how much I want to “Watch this!”, explain why something is the way it is when I come into the house to make lunch, or be stopped on the way out to my office to give one last hug. But it’s in the quiet that the Lord reminds me that the child I miss is someone I have been given to steward and shepherd toward an end outside of herself, toward an end that requires the kind of faith I need for myself in this moment.
Trusting the teachers and administrators at Maggie’s school to care for and shepherd her has helped me realize the sort of trust I need in the Lord to ultimately care for and shepherd Maggie well beyond these first days of kindergarten.
Letting go of control allows me to grab hold of faith.
The tiny tears in my heart and the tiny tears on Maggie’s cheeks are reminders that we will both find ways to grow in this new season—she in her independence, and I in my dependence.
Growing isn’t comfortable, but it is good. And while we parents and our children will grow separately in times like these, we grow together, too.
Dropping Maggie off this morning felt like pressing the fast forward button such that it threatens to be stuck that way for the next 13 years.
I just hope to figure out how to press pause from time to time.
Beautifully written. My girls are in their 40s. Tears still happen at times. God is good.
Little tears here as well, reading this. I know exactly what you mean. Be ready with a great after-school snack to hear all about her day! You got this, Martins.