My Life's Work... (anger in letting go)

My life’s work…

I nursed a murky feeling after dropping the second of my three daughters off to college.  On the return home, travelling northbound on I69, I swallowed hard to fight back tears of sadness, but I was surprised with a subtle anger that accompanied the full range of emotions coming at me from what seemed like all sides.

Anger of all things.

Not an anger over some sort of enmity or regret.  Nor an anger over unresolved conflict or unfulfilled expectations.  No, this was a harder anger to define—a jello that tore through every nail trying affix it to the wall of heart.

It wasn’t until we crossed over into Michigan that I was beginning to construct something of any sense out of the conflicting debris that was cluttering my cranium.  I didn’t put it into words until Heidi asked what I was feeling.

“I feel some sense of anger for some reason this go around. Like you work your whole life to raise your children only to be severed from them just when it’s getting good. It’s like my ‘life’s work’ is stolen from me all in one moment.”

When I said these words, they didn’t provide a complete summation of my anger, but it was enough explanation to sufficiently satisfy my own desire to unearth the volcanic lava seeking expulsion. It’s funny how working out your feelings with words can begin to help deescalate the feelings triggering confusing responses.  I still don’t know if I got to the bottom of the anger, but the aforementioned paragraph is in the ballpark of what was going on between my ears and under my sternum.

Like a sculptor who finished a sculpture only to see it packed in a shipping container and sent off to grace someone else’s living room, I felt like I had been whittling and carving and chipping away at my girls lives for 18 years, and just about the time I was putting on some finishing touches and blowing off the dust and buffing out some cloudy surfaces, they were taken from me by the harsh force of chronology.  Time waits for no man and often does let you step back to enjoy your work.  It just pilfers you and when you turn around—gone. Barely a glimpse of the glory you’ve been hewing and shaving and fashioning hour by hour, day by day, year after year. Gone, in what seems like a cruel instant.

Just when all you worked for in your child is just “getting good”…it is whisked away by the future.  Just when your children begin asking you questions about your day.  Just when they start to say thank you for things they never noted or noticed before.  Just when they begin to care about things you care about.  Just when they begin to apologize without prompting for something they caused that brought disruption to life.  

Just when life was becoming reciprocal.

The chapter is over. The page gets turned.  And you start a new chapter.

I’ve written about the excitement of this process elsewhere.  I’ve taken time to share the exceeding joy and the greater good and the overarching purpose of parenting…the leaving and the cleaving so to speak.  But for now, I want to let the low grade fever of fury stick around for a minute.  Is that ok? It seems like I need some time to work out this pesky annoyance that hasn’t subsided as quickly as I thought it would.  Even though I was able to articulate it’s origin, I still haven’t been able to reckon with the result(s).  

It is, as I said before, my ‘life’s work” we’re talking about here.  They are my little masterpieces and it’s hard to let them go, to place them in someone else’s hands.  I’m sure I’ll jot down more musings surrounding this season, but for now, I’ll leave this grouping of thoughts and feelings suspended right here. Dangling.