We’ve reached cruising altitude. I’m above the clouds, looking down on earth from 30,000 feet.
My daughter is sitting beside me, her head on my shoulder as she sleeps. She was up late packing and then awoke before dawn for an early morning flight. Beneath me somewhere in the plane’s belly are her bags filled with clothing and towels, bedding and school supplies. On Sunday we’ll be helping her move into college.
She is our last to move away. One by one, they have done what they are supposed to do: separating, becoming more independent, living on their own, away from us. Much of parenting—and I think, more broadly, life—is the realization that there is precious little (if anything) you control, the understanding that it’s less about holding on and more about letting go.
I wonder what it will be like now to love all three of our children from afar. I wonder what a house that was once alive with the sounds of their music and the voices of their friends will feel like when it’s quieter and emptier (and neater, too). I wonder if my heart might somehow feel emptier and fuller at the same time, hollowed out by their absence, made whole in the satisfaction that (I hope) accompanies the completion of this particular chapter of parental obligation.
Pirkei Avot, our great collection of the wisdom of our sages, teaches: “All love that is dependent on something, when that thing is no more, the love is no more. But love that is not dependent on a thing, this love lasts forever.”
Loving from afar will be harder. The distance will be painful. But our love was never about proximity.
This is what I tell myself as I turn my gaze from the rolling plains beneath me to my daughter’s head resting on my shoulder. Holding on. Letting go. Loving—forever.
Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Yoshi