I’ve been telling people recently that I’m having a false sense of finality. Recently, I was walking with Nora through the chaos of a home track meet at her and Gabe’s high school, where we’d come to see him run the mile (side note that he missed the start that day due to not being able to find a jersey; ran the event at his next meet in his green and yellow Steely Dan t-shirt - they happen to be the colors of his school; and was finally given a proper jersey at practice recently that he deemed, “very tight”…this how track is going, but he’s fast enough, just a freshman, and his coaches are incredibly generous of spirit with, it seems, a good sense of humor).

As we were leaving, worried as we walked too close to the shot put pit, I said something about these being the last days of all this! High school! And Nora, ever so wise, ever so graceful, reminded me of my other two children, and the fact that these are by no means my last days as a parent at this high school, which, to be clear, was what I meant; her experience ending, sure, but also mine.

Which it is decidedly not. Aidy, our third child, is experiencing a milestone year, too; she’s moving on from our beloved elementary school just down the road (Maisie and I resolutely walk her there nearly every morning and on one such walk this week, I realized suddenly, tragically, that soon enough we will encounter that final milestone, as well - “last walk to elementary school” - and the dog will not know, I suppose, although I sense, somehow that she will) and heads to middle school in the fall. But she will still be in this particular school system for - let me calculate - ever. Or, in more realistic terms, the next six years.

So, as Nora suggested in more compassionate language: calm down.

Sometimes I wonder if I’ll look back on this particular era of my parenting and writing and think that I overdid it on the sentimentality vibes. Objectively, yes, that is what is happening. But it is so hard to think or write about anything else. It’s very difficult not to get all caught up in the windfall of these emotions and I keep thinking to myself, “Cara, you need to meditate. Mindfulness is the thing that reminds you that feelings are just feelings and you don’t have to fully weather the storm each time one arises. Because they so often arise.” I really should be meditating.

However, as I’ve mentioned in some of my recent posts, I think that this is an ok time for reveling (even the tearful kind) because there aren’t that many times in life like this. Where it feels like it’s impossible to go too far, as long as you aren’t going too far in the wrong direction. Not putting too many expectations on the children, on the situation itself. Just letting your own emotional upheaval play out as required. It’s tough to keep that balance - not to get clingy or try too hard to find the right words and start pontificating. I mean, look at all these words. Perhaps it’s too late for that.

One symptom of all this nostalgia-in-the-making is that I’ve been thinking about my own teenage years quite a bit and last night was remembering how much I loved all the American transcendentalist writers, in particular Ralph Waldo Emerson. I searched for one poem in particular (very soothing considering the current overwrought state of affairs, very soothing always) and wrote it on post it notes which I placed on the refrigerator.

Write it on your heart
that every day is the best day in the year.
He is rich who owns the day, and no one owns the day
who allows it to be invaded with fret and anxiety.

Finish every day and be done with it.
You have done what you could.
Some blunders and absurdities, no doubt crept in.
Forget them as soon as you can, tomorrow is a new day;
begin it well and serenely, with too high a spirit
to be cumbered with your old nonsense.

This new day is too dear,
with its hopes and invitations,
to waste a moment on the yesterdays.

“Write it!” Like my dad used to say whenever I mentioned anything he thought would make a good story, and he thought nearly everything would (so do I, apparently!)

I think what I’m getting at in this current swirl of words is related to how I worry - with all these attempts to ensure my feelings meet but don’t exceed the moment - that I won’t maintain the proper distance needed to be a good parent. Making sure my own fragile psyche doesn’t mind-mild into theirs. This feeling…of having a first child get ready to leave home…that’s mine, and this one…of soaking up these final walks to the elementary school…that’s mine, too. But the real doing, the actual moving on…that’s theirs. And I don’t think they’re as rattled by it as I am. They don’t seem rattled by their own big milestones at all. As it should be.

Last night, though, Aidy - after lying on the floor in Nora’s room, listening to Taylor Swift songs with her big sister - retreated to her bed where she started wholeheartedly crying. She told me that she doesn’t want Nora to go, and about how she’s never going to see her again for four years (I corrected this assessment). I got in bed with her and realized I didn’t know how to do this right. To be the parent in this situation…to not be a fellow bereft, soon-to-be-abandoned family member. Unclear where one of us started and the other began.

But I didn’t need to know. The comfort, the empathy - I hope - that was parenting enough (“you have done what you could/tomorrow is a new day”). Sometimes you arrive with sufficient reserves to simply be present. “It would be so nice,” I told Aidy, “if everything stayed the same. But that’s what makes life good. That it doesn’t.”

I said it, trying not to cry myself. I repeated it, so that I would know it, too.

One morning last week I was driving Gabe and Nora to school, last minute, as usual (they'd said they'd walk, ok, whatever). But it was raining and, sure I would. These days, how could I not?

They were talking about all the upcoming events: Nora's jazz concert, the high school coffee house, who would go to what, and reminders from the drivers’ seat that if you decide on this plan over the other you are going to need to find a kind family or friend to bring you home. Etcetera, etcetera; the trappings of teenage-hood. Me, a solid parent of teens now.

I used to (and still do) observe these very people admiringly. They seemed so…cool. The teenagers themselves were interesting too I suppose - not for me to really know, a bewildered consumer of youth culture if anything. But I couldn't get enough of the parents. They'd go out to dinner whenever. They didn't know where their kids were exactly. I am that now, I thought, having somehow arrived without any thorough insights on how the journey took place. I just kept getting up and making them go to school. I just kept buying larger sneakers, and now I can’t tell, looking at them cluttering the mudroom floor, which shoes belong to which person.

Alongside this realization, I have been thinking about writing, too. About how their stories aren't really mine to tell anymore. It’s both a practical acknowledgment and (perhaps?) a big deal for someone like me, who has been writing their lives for so many years. Borrowing their experience for my own telling. And there are some stories I’ll keep telling anyway, forever - this is the earned privilege of being a mom I think - about how Gabe just got back from China, how the river cruise in Shanghai was his favorite day. And how Nora just ordered a bunch of prom dresses to try on.

But the rest is really their own, and I’ve realized over the past few weeks especially, as I sink into a new job and they go off on their own adventures, how much more calm I am when they are out and about. Like around town, sure, but also halfway across the world. It’s shocking but expected that what happens in life is - you get used to things.

Still, though, on mornings like that recent one when I have them trapped in the car for a few minutes, it’s hard to stop talking. You know, while I still have them. I have this compulsion to take those gifted moments of togetherness and try and impart all the wisdom I can. When what I know to be true - what the experts say - is that most teenagers (honestly most people) would prefer a quiet, steadfast role model type. There, mostly silent, to receive and not so much to give fast-paced coffee-fueled advice at 7:10 a.m.

I think when you see parents all obsessed, all abuzz about their children, it is, yes, sometimes, because of worry; because of fear that things will end up not the way you expected or wanted. And while I can understand that, I also think that for me, maybe for a lot of us, it has to do with being sure I provide all the lessons I can before they leave for that next thing that isn’t the confines of the family vehicle. Like that if I don't get in every bit of learned knowledge I have accrued in my own life, I won't ever get to tell them.

Which is, of course, nonsense. When my children go places, I'm still here and we are still us. The parental relationship doesn't dissolve (just look at all the advice I've received from my own mother in recent years, and I left home, well, some time ago). And also, they'll figure some of it out on their own. You know what, they’ll figure most of it out. Because, as I like to tell them (god do I love to tell them!) the learning is so often in the doing.

And so, finding myself here, I’m thinking about what I’ll tell you next, and I’m thinking about how to get better at letting the peaceful moments be. I’m thinking about how it’s a bit of a relief for children and parents to become just slightly irrelevant to each other, that this is the way it should be (like how it wasn’t cool when I tried to use “chopped” and how my kids love it when J and I go out for a drink, the house devoid of our ever-present parental energy).

It’s a challenging but peaceful endeavor, it feels like knowing you are doing the right thing. Me, so so talkative - my goodness! - trying to be a little bit more quiet.