Arrows Ache To Fly

We attended our church’s senior banquet last Sunday night — the one for seniors graduating from high school. May means that a lot of moms and dads are preparing for one of the hardest parts of parenting; letting them go. Hard is hardly an adequate word for it, but phrases like Emotional Water Boarding, Psychological Evisceration or Heart-rending Relational Histrionics take up too much space when you’re trying to keep your word count reasonable.

When we drove away with our older son standing on the steps of his dorm, we wept all the way back to the hotel, through the packing and checkout, and most of the five hour ride home. He cried some, too, although he had been ready to leave home since he was twelve. Not prepared, mind you, but ready to be fully differentiated from his parents. Over the next four years, he lived in the tension between the desire to be completely independent and the fact that he wasn’t. We were, I think, gracious when he called for sympathy or a little extra cash, but we quietly celebrated each of his confrontations with reality. It’s nice to be needed. Nicer when they admit it.

A couple of years later, we drove away with our younger son standing on the curb outside his new home. One might assume that leaving the first child at college would prepare parents for leaving the last. One would be wrong. It’s a long, long way from Abilene, TX, where son number two matriculated, to Atlanta, GA. Nine-hundred-fifty green mile markers blurred by. Sixteen hours ticked off the clock. Five states rolled beneath the tires. There was no use in trying to count the tears. We cried more the second time neither because we loved son number two more or because he was less prepared to leave. We cried more the second time because when we walked through the door at home, there was not another boy to finish raising. Just a couple of dogs, and they didn’t count.

Of course, it could have been so much worse. Some parents drive away from funeral homes. Some watch from the dock as their children climb the gangway in a crisp military issue uniform, destined for some dangerous port in some distant place. There are as many ways it could have been worse as there were tears for what it was.

Perhaps the leaving of our sons hit me so hard because it was a severe reminder of my own passage. Had it been that long since my father baited my hooks or put a pistol in my hands for the first time and pointed me toward an old board he had nailed to a tree in the wood behind our home? The truth is, I don’t really mind getting older. At least not yet. Age has its advantages. I wouldn’t trade the wisdom the decades have bequeathed for all the physical flexibility of my younger years. Besides, age, like youth, comes with a hall pass to say what’s on your mind.

It’s probably not the reminder of mortality that puts parents back on their heels when their children transition away. I think we just miss them. We miss being coach, counselor and confidant. We miss their moodiness and mischief. We pull back the curtains at the house to see if their rowdy friends are going to drop by to hang out and raid the fridge. Children, regardless of their age, generate a sense of movement, vitality and expectation in your home. You always have the feeling that something momentous is about to happen. It is an awesome thing to live under the same roof with someone who takes his becoming so seriously, who exudes anticipation and strides into each new day like a conqueror bent on conquest.

I read somewhere once that parenting is like riding a raft down a river churning with class-five rapids. One plunge brings hysterical laughter, the next abject terror. The terror gives way to relief, relief to awe, awe to tears and the tears turn back again to hilarity. If parenting is a ride down a raging river, then sending the last child off to college is slipping from the rapids into the calm expanse of a placid lake. The adventure isn’t over, but this leg of the journey will undoubtedly require a different set of survival skills.
I don’t think Solomon ever drove off in his chariot leaving a son standing on the steps of an ancient dormitory, but what he wrote in Psalm 127:3 – 5, invests what parents of nearly-grown children feel with language stout enough to bear the load. The Bible is good at that.

“Sons are a heritage from the Lord, children a reward from him. Like arrows in the hands of a warrior are the sons born in one’s youth. Blessed is the man whose quiver is full of them.”

Sometimes, I wish we’d had another arrow to notch into the bow. I’d have trimmed the feathers, sharpened the point and trued the shaft. I would have pulled the bowstring as far back as I could, taken careful aim and released him into his future. But then every quiver, no matter how full, finally gives up its last bolt. A dozen daughters, two sons or twenty, every parent eventually sees the last son or daughter wave goodbye. Arrows, after all, ache to fly. It is good and it is right. But it is hard.