When your heart walks around outside your body

We take Aaron back to Houston this weekend for his second semester of college. While I’m excited for his new classes and his new adventures, I’m also sad. It’s been wonderful having him home the last few weeks, and I’m going to miss him when he’s gone again. The house is going to empty once again of all the beautiful music that has filled it since he’s been home.

Parenting a college kid has been one of the proudest yet hardest stages of parenting yet. Seeing them grow and change and develop in ways that you had nothing to do with is humbling. Realizing they can make it without you makes you both smile and cry.

I once heard someone describe being a parent as the experience of having a part of your heart walking around outside your body. I didn’t understand that until I had children, and then once I did, I understood completely. I understand that even more now with Aaron so much farther away than he’s ever been in his life.

Parenting is a strange thing, really. It both sucks the life out of you, and gives you more than you could ever imagine, all at the same time. As a parent, you teach your children so many lessons about living. In turn, your children teach you so many lessons about life.

Parenting is, hands down, the hardest yet most rewarding job that I have ever done. It is also the one that has been the most important. It’s funny really when you think of parenting as a “job”. For your career or vocation, you tend to learn how to do it through your education and training but also from having mentors who teach you how to do your job. But despite all the education, all the training, all the advice you may have gotten before starting the job, you still for the most part have no idea what the heck you are doing when you start, and you just have to figure it out as you go along, sometimes making it up as you go. 

Parenting is the same way. Some of us had better education and training and mentorship than others, because we had good parents who showed us by example how to be parents. Some of us were older, and more patient, and more wise before we started this journey, and had more life experiences to guide us along the way. But truthfully, none of us ever truly know what we are doing when we start. We figure it out as we go along. Sometimes we even make it up as we go. Sometimes we get it wrong. Sometimes we get it right. But it almost always turns out just fine, despite our mistakes, despite our shortcomings, despite the times we wish we could ask for a do-over.

Parenting has its different challenges at all ages and stages of development. When your kids are babies and littles, and you’re in the weeds of diapers and bottles and lack of sleep and all that goes with it, you think parenting can’t ever get harder or more precious. And you think that until they hit the next stage, and then the next, and the next, and then the one after that. The truth is, all the ages and stages are both hard and amazing. And every step of the way, you are quite certain that you are screwing the whole thing up and that there will never be enough therapy to fix all the ways that you damaged your kids. And you know what? 99% of the time, they are going to be just fine.

So if you’re a parent that’s in the weeds of infancy or early childhood, or in the awkwardness of middle school years, or the angst of the teenage years, or the push and pull struggle of letting go of and being let go of with your college kids, or even if your kids are grown with kids of their own, be encouraged.

You’re doing a good job, mama. 

You’re doing a good job, daddy.

Just keep loving those babies, regardless of their ages. Keep on loving them even when you want to choke them. Keep on loving them even when they aren’t very lovable and are pushing you away. And support them, no matter what. Even when the choices they make aren’t yours or the people they become aren’t at all what you imagined when you laid eyes on them for the first time. And make sure they know you support them.  Because as hard as parenting is, growing up is even harder.  And they don’t ever outgrow the need for their parents’ acceptance and their parents’ love. And we as parents don’t ever outgrow our need to give it to them.