Nature and God are Persistent
When Your Young Adult Child Moves Out
Last week, one of our daughters moved into her first apartment. It was time. She was itching for independence from the time she insisted on getting out of diapers (like her big sister!) at the age of one. On her move-out day, my smart watched ticked the steps, totaling 11,000 by day’s end. Eleven thousands steps of celebrating her independence: moving boxes, unpacking a kitchen, wiping down cabinets.
I tried to embrace the day by celebrating it as a rite of passage. But to be honest, the night before, as I waited for nightly meds to engulf me in a fog of sleep, a few tears slipped down my face as I revisited our last 20 years together.
There are so many ways I’ve grown up, just as she’s grown up. So many things I’ve learned about parenting, about myself, and about the unique and specific individual that is this human I was allowed to raise. And for a minute, I wished I could take back some time and do over a few turbulent evenings, weeks, and seasons.
If you’ve been a parent longer than five minutes, chances are you’ve wished for a do-over simply because you learned a better way. The irony, though, is that we learn these better ways by living out the inferior ones, which makes the start of each new parenting step not so much a leveling up but a leveling out, a regaining of our footing just before we fall short—again. And, this constant sense of being a little bit off our games (at least with our first, and maybe second and third, child) is what tempts me to imagine a parenting do-over—one with more wisdom, grace, and winsome appeal, bestowing lessons on a (perhaps) more grateful recipient (because of my more winsome approach).
It so happened that the week before her move, I’d picked up a book about Christian discipleship and maturity by Ron Rolheiser. I had no expectation that it would speak to a mother letting her adult child fly the nest, but Rolheiser likens the journey of discipleship to the stages of a life, and specifically likens the setting out of the prodigal son to the wanderlust of youth with its powerful temptations in all directions. This paragraph stopped me up short:
“Fortunately…nature and God are persistent and lay their own traps and enticements to lure us into adulthood. Puberty drives us out of our first home, and though it may take 10 or 20 years, most of us eventually find our way back home again, to a new home, one that we have created for ourselves.”
It is a comfort to remember that not all lessons can be learned under a parent’s roof. God knows I did so much learning when, at 18, I moved into a tiny basement apartment in my college town and then into another (this time moldy) basement apartment at 19 and newly married. In fact, it would be impossible to learn what can be learned on one’s own before one is actually on one’s own.
With our perpetually flawed execution of good intentions, we parents spend approximately 18 years laying our own traps and enticements to lure our children into adulthood. Chore charts, consequences, allowance, and driver’s ed—complete with enticements to forgive, cooperate, suffer long with siblings, love God and Scripture, lean into the voice of the Holy Spirit—well, these were our enticements to design. And now, paradoxically, we must of course remain parents while simultaneously handing our baton off to “nature and God,” trusting them to do the work that only God and nature can do, to lure our children home, but not to our literal houses, mind you. No, we must trust God to lure them home to their centered-in-God selves.
Parent friends, I pray we would feel able, willing, joyful in releasing our grip on that baton, knowing we’ve sprinted our quarter of the track with as much faithfulness and doggedness we could muster. Let us let God take it from here.
Releasing the grip on the baton....what a beautiful way to put it. It never gets easier, but it is always necessary for their sake (and ours, to be honest). Blessings as you let her fly.