Getting body, heart, and soul back

I was explaining to another mom recently about how I felt now that my kids are older, and I have gone through the process of getting my body back (not having a kid hanging on me all the time) and my soul back (feeling like my emotions are tightly wrapped up in theirs). She said that she has heard other parents say that having a child is like reinstalling your heart in another person’s body, which is a similarly appealing analogy. (Though then the literalist in me wonders how you split up your heart into your multiple children…. the soul I can imagine as a more diffuse thing, easier to divvy up among the children!)

It’s a surprising thing the day you step back and realize that you’ve got it all back—yes, you still love your children and their joys, failures, heartaches, and successes are an important part of your life—but you see them go off and have these experiences independently from you. I can see this both with my homeschooled child and the one who is attending school, so it’s not just a function of sending your kids physically away from you each day. There’s something else, some elemental bond that is still there but becomes less like a heavy leather leash and more like an ethereal thread that can stretch to any distance necessary.

The leash was hard for me. I remember the weird mix of relief and anxiety I’d get when I found a way to get away from my small children for a time. They both went to preschool, and both spent time with babysitters and other family members. But no matter how much they were away from me, it didn’t make that leash feel any more comfortable. Small children are so dependent on us physically that even when they’re not with us our bodies are in tune with theirs. I would get a morning to work and have to resist the temptation to call my mom to see if she’d remembered to give them a snack. My body would remind me, even though I wasn’t hungry, that unless snacktime happened it would be fusstime.

Yesterday I had a real milestone dropping my 14-year-old at his first community college class. Those of you with smaller children are probably expecting that I’ll say that he and I were both anxious and wondering how it would go. The wondering part, yes, but anxious? Not really. It just seemed natural and easy to leave my child in the company of random adults with an apparent age-span of 50 years. He and I waited outside the classroom, then once the other class let out, it was just a simple “seeya later” and I walked away.

One of the things I’ve learned in my parenting years is that when your child is really ready for something, you can actually feel it. I remember when I realized that my son was truly ready for kindergarten, about half-way through his last year of preschool. His teacher noticed it, too. “He is SO done with preschool,” she told me. I also remember my anxiety about whether my daughter was ready for kindergarten. If I had listened to myself more, the answer would have been a clear “no.” Though she was truly more than ready to do the intellectual learning expected of her, she wasn’t ready for the demands of a classroom. It took us three miserable months to get that through my thick skull (which had been so busy planning what I was going to do with my free time that I ignored all the signals). She ended up not being ready for the classroom experience until she was almost ten. How much heartache could we have avoided if we’d listened to the clear signals that she needed time to develop skills that other children tend to develop earlier?

I think this being able to feel your child’s readiness is related again to the leash—or that ethereal thread. There’s just a certain feeling that comes up with a child is attempting something doable. Of course, at times there is value in attempting something that will end in failure, but for the most part I like to use the image that teachers use: scaffolding. You offer up learning in chunks big enough that the child is able to go up a step and reach something new, but you don’t offer that high window of learning until the scaffolding is built up. Similarly, in deciding which new experiences are right for a child, it’s helpful to look and see what kind of a stretch that experience will be.

Only a year ago my son was saying that he “never” wanted to go to community college during his homeschooling. But in that last year the scaffolding rose up, and yesterday that new window was an easy reach.

“Seeya later—”

and that ethereal thread stretched just a little bit further.