My kids started school again today. The end of summer is never a favorite time for me, and the start of school was personally anxiety-provoking. My children both have some of their own anxieties, but thankfully, nowhere near the level I would reach yearly. Each year when they start school, I quietly whisper my fears to friends, my husband, or my sister, carefully not letting my kids in on how triggering the big day is for me.
Being a mother is something I have wanted to be since I was a little girl. Meeting the right person to start a family with wasn’t easy, and then trying to start our family wasn’t easy either. We persevered, though, and to say we got everything we hoped for is an understatement. It was as if someone pressed the restart button on our lives when we became parents. When my daughter was a newborn, I spent so much time staring at her and marveling that she was mine. My life, my role,and my job all changed after becoming a mother. I made sacrifices, gave up some goals, made some new ones, and had zero regrets. As my daughter now begins planning for college, it is difficult for me to process that while I will never stop being her mother, she will leave this home we built and start her own adult life and experiences. This is what we all hope and wish for our children. It is healthy, but also hard.
Last night, I watched as both my daughter and son chose their first-day-of-school outfits, packed their backpacks, and made plans with friends to head into school together. Pride filled me as I witnessed how calm they were. I took the dog for a walk and took some deep breaths, trying to quell my own butterflies. Old habits die hard, it’s true, but this year feels bigger because it is my daughter’s last year of High School. It is her last first day of school, and the last day they will head off together. My mind is spinning that we're already here at this point. I know everyone says the days are long and the years are short, but how did it go by this quickly?
With the end of summer comes the end of the unstructured freedom that ten weeks off from school allows. My son skated, surfed, and biked to his heart’s content this summer. My daughter worked her first job as a day camp counselor and made money while playing with kids in the ocean. She did an internship, worked on her college essays, and saw friends. We traveled, we celebrated milestones and birthdays. We had a lot of fun in the sun.
As a send-off to our summer, we surprised the kids and took them parasailing this past weekend. They were more hesitant than we expected, and not only did they want to know what the surprise was, but they also wanted us to be on the boat when they did it. They were scared and had many questions. “Does it really go one thousand feet up?” They asked unsurely. We went on the boat with them and watched their faces teeter between fear and excitement as the instructions were given to them. When they were all harnessed next to each other, they took their seats on the front of the boat facing us and their backs to the water. As the boat sped up, the parachute filled with air, and they lifted up and away. My son’s expression was wide-eyed and surprised. My daughter had a huge smile and bright eyes. As they lifted further and further away, I felt a tug in my gut. I hadn’t been scared for them, I too was excited, but suddenly my babies were too blurry to see anything other than their outlines. A slight panic fell over me as I watched them high in the sky. They felt too far away from me, yet the rope tethered them to the very boat I was on, just like their umbilical did years ago. Maybe the cords that connected us to each other were also quite long and just felt shorter all curled up. I looked it up, though, and an umbilical cord at its longest is not even two feet. They were 998 feet further from me. For someone who suffers from anxiety, I am thankfully not overly worried about my kids. I ask questions, make sure they are safe, but I don’t let my mind wander to the worst what-ifs. I did on the boat, though. I let myself drift into the worst-case scenarios for a few dark moments. Then I calmed myself down and looked at them with a smile on my face. They are growing up, they are doing it well, and they are soaring.
