Standing at the Precipice

As I am preparing to send my daughter off to seminary in a few weeks, I am starting to sense a vague feeling of loss that is hard to really pin down.

The truth is, it’s not like I really have a lot of quality time with her. I’ll see her for a few minutes in the morning as she’s rushing out to school or camp. In the evenings we pass each other by in the house. We have 15 minutes at dinner where some days something meaningful might be said, but at least as often there’s general chaos and somebody getting annoyed at somebody else. Probably most days if you analyzed the conversation that passed between us over the course of our waking hours, it wouldn’t look like much.

So why does it feel like I’m about to lose something so precious?

It’s funny that over these past 18 years of physical and emotional labor it’s been easy to forget that the goal has actually been to get to this point – the launch.

The point of changing diapers, feeding, running behind the bike, driving to playdates, setting curfew, and so on, was never just to get to the end of the day or teach a skill or keep her safe. The real point was always to put all those things together and build a human being who would one day be able to do all those things for herself, without me there to do it for her.

Well, in a measured way, the rubber is about to hit the road.

And, as every parent has discovered before me, when you pick your head up from the daily grind of parenting and remember that it was really all for this moment, it is a terrifying shock. One’s instinct is to hold on tight and not let go, because heck you poured all this work and sweat and love into this thing, and now you’re just going to let it walk out the door? It’s crazy. It’s self-destructive. It’s mad.

But it’s also really the reason we’ve done everything we’ve ever done. When I’m able to zoom out from this moment, I tune into the reality that I’m just a link in a chain stretching back across the generations and forward into eternity. And the only impact I can have is not in how many spoonfuls of cereal I got into that face or how many pages of homework I got handed in just barely on time, but in whether I was able to develop another human being who could function well enough in the world to then go on one day to develop another human being in her own right, and so on.

There’s so much that I hope and pray and wish for standing here at the precipice. Did I give her enough confidence in who she is? Did I give her the ability to set boundaries for herself and others? Does she know – does she really know?? – that I love her no matter what, and that G-d loves her too?

G-d, I hope so.

There’s no going back. There’s no more time to right the mistakes of the past (and I’ve made plenty of those). There’s only every moment of the present, and the future to come – fraught, as it always is, with so much uncertainty.

So, I’m sending her off with all the provisions I was able to pull together for her, knowing that she will surely face troubles out there, hoping that what I’ve given her will be enough to stay the course. And I wonder – when those troubles come, and those provisions run low, will she also remember that I’m never too far behind? Have I made myself into a person she can turn to in good times and in bad? Have I created something between us that she can come back to and build into a relationship of adults?

I think, I pray, that I have. And if so, then there is much comfort to be had. For if indeed there is something I'm losing, the promise of the future is that it’s going to be replaced by something even better.