December 11, 2022

Dear Columbus Academy Families,

When my first child was born, I was told new mothers shouldn’t watch movies depicting missing, sick or hurt children because they are so emotionally raw. While I was a bit tender-spirited at the time, I was sure I would be able to get through any shows I was accustomed to watching. So wrong was I that I still can’t take them in.

Here was the beginning of my experience with the power of sentimentality as a parent – a deep and wide well of fret, love and anxiety that compounds with every imagined difficulty my child could face. Not only was I able to see danger as highly likely during any activity as simple as a walk, but I simultaneously became both of my sons’ first admirer of their idiosyncrasies (as only a mother could love): one’s square-blockish baby feet, the other’s made-up language, and even a jaunty image of hand-me-down red overalls slung over an 18-month-old body. All those adored features about my sons’ growing up has emulsified with their emerging adulthood to the point that they have become odd phantom-sons who both live away from us as 20-somethings and are still in my mind as third-graders.

Nostalgia finds fertile ground in the brain of an empty-nester, and nowhere have I seen the ache of parenting college-aged children more accurately captured than by Beverly Beckham in her 2006 essay I was the Sun, My Kids Were the Planets:

Children don’t need to be away from home for us to feel all the things parents feel, but when they are away, missing them doesn’t get punctuated with the other more mundane and irritating parts of being in charge of younger beings. What we are left with is a muddied perspective of who they were and who they are without much accurate or balanced evidence of either.

So why do I write all of this to a sea of parents who have children young enough to be at home and in our school? Because, by looking back on my own children’s growth – and thereby my development as a parent – I realize that it may be that I never do see my children clearly but, instead, I see them sentimentally; a protective coating of love, fears and hopes that cloaks them throughout their life. How I view both of them influences their views of themselves, and sometimes that cloak of my interpretation of who they are acts like loving armor but other times it’s more like a hasty straightjacket. The ultimate plight of parenting is that clarity eludes us because rationality and neutrality elude us, and we are left with a cloudy way we know our children. Even though it is our way.

Vacations with everyone at home have always provided a chance for me and my husband to clear away the fog of seeing who our boys are becoming. They tend to be around at empty times – to play a game or clean the kitchen with me – and conversations develop naturally. The open-ended nature of vacation time gives us choice of how to spend it together, and through those choices our growing offspring reveal their inside worlds to us. The upcoming holidays are not as much a break from school as a check-in with each other, a reassertion of family culture and an opportunity to recalibrate our sense of how everyone is doing.

And hazy though we are in understanding our children, it might be an essential element to loving them so fully and unconditionally as parents do. I can’t imagine another way nature would have us devote all of ourselves to other living beings.

I wish you all a wonderful winter time away and hope you are able to be in some empty time with your children and find out who they are becoming.

See you in the new year!

Melissa