By Jenny Monahan, Director of Marketing and Communication
A few weeks ago, My Wise Friend Sarah Hogue wrote a beautiful blog post about dropping her son, Sam, off at college, called Hold On. I admit that I ugly-cried in front of my computer while reading it, the day before I dropped my own oldest child off at college.
We’re three weeks in with this new phase of parenting, and I’m finding that it’s indeed a different experience to be a parent of a young adult. I have spent the last 18+ years actively managing the life of another human attempting to help her learn and grow and thrive. Since August 21, the tasks of trying to make sure my daughter eats vegetables (she does), gets home safely from wherever she went (she has, thank God), or goes to bed at a reasonable time (iffy) are her responsibility now.
My role has officially changed and includes a new set of responsibilities—ones I’m figuring out as I go along. So far, as best I can tell, my job is to:
- Stay in the background and wait for her to call/text/ask if she wants advice or help.
- Suppress the urge to call/text/check in multiple times a day.
- Love her. From the sidelines, cheering her on silently. Without hovering.
The only thing that stayed the same as the first 18 years is the “love her” part.
But that love looks different today than when she was a newborn who needed EVERYTHING, a toddler who needed me to read her a book, an 8-year-old who needed coaching about how to handle an issue with a friend, or a teen who needed guidance and homecoming dresses and driving lessons.
Choosing to trust the (amazing) young woman she has become – to trust her out in the world among strangers and people who might not want the best for her and Mean People – is a hard thing to choose. Not because I don’t trust her, but because she’s my baby and I love her and I don’t want anything really bad to happen to her, EVER.
I pray every day for her to be OK and to thrive and to know how much we love her. And it strikes me that this might be a bit like the way God feels about us.
There’s a reason that we talk about God as Father (2 Corinthians 6:18) and Mother (Isaiah 66:13). Assuming that our experience of family is a healthy and loving one, parenting is one of the best analogies we have as humans for how to love someone so fiercely, so selflessly, so unconditionally that it is actually a reflection of God’s love for us.
And – I certainly don’t pretend to know God’s parenting style here – while there are times God plays an active role in our lives, especially when we ask for help, I imagine there are also times when God chooses to sit on the sidelines, always present, always loving us, always cheering us on…but letting us do our thing.
There are likely times where God lets us fail, without intervening, because there’s a lesson to be learned that will ultimately help us become the people God is calling us to be. Times when God allows us to suffer because suffering is part of the human experience, part of how we grow in understanding and compassion. Times when God rolls God’s all-knowing eyes and wonders what we were possibly thinking when we made that decision?!? But God sits on the sidelines and lets us make that stupid decision because God gave us free will, and sometimes we use that free will to screw things up.
The “letting go” part of parenting is something that seems to happen over and over and over again. Letting go of a tiny hand so they can walk by themselves. Letting go of the bike so they can ride. Giving the goodbye hug that Sarah described, so they can start a new part of their lives as adults.
But letting go doesn’t mean we aren’t still present, loving them, responding when they ask for help.
Experiencing this new phase of parenting for the first time is helping me understand and appreciate God’s love for us a little better. God is present with us, always aware of us, always loving us—regardless of whether we’re thinking of God in that moment.
As Paul says in his letter to the Romans, “For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.” (Romans 8:38-39).
Though the words from Romans were familiar, living through my first extended physical separation from a child is helping me understand them in a new way—teaching me that if my own human love for this child is so strong, how much stronger even than that is God’s infinite love for each of us.
Dutilh Church 