Becks in midlife

The return to college, the heartbreak, and the reason I even thought about writing a stupid blog

No one tells you how many hard things you will have to do as a parent, and if they do tell you, they don’t tell you that some of the hardest things you will ever have to do, you will have to do more than once.

Take sleep training for example. We thought we were the smartest, most successful parents ever when we (finally) managed to get our one year old daughter to sleep through the night. She had been a HORRENDOUS sleeper for the first year of her life, the poster child for reflux, colic, and just plain stubbornness (not to mention clueless parents), to the point that close friends avoided our house at specific hours of the day. So we read the books, and made the plan, and stuck it out together, progressively getting further and further from her crib until finally we were sitting in the hallway outside her room and we could hear her settle herself and fall asleep. We had done it! Or so we thought.

Enter the 5 year saga that was getting this kid to sleep IN HER OWN BED through the night. Every time she got sick, or we travelled or had company (don’t even get me started on the needing to get out of bed to go potty time period), we would have to start sleep training all over again. If I’m being honest, sometimes our commitment and consistency waned and we didn’t stick with returning her to her bed each time she slipped in with us in exchange for a few more precious moments of sleep. Sometimes we were so exhausted and she was so straight-up sneaky, we wouldn’t even realized she had gotten in to our bed until the next morning. Then one day, the summer before kindergarten started, I awoke very early to my husband rolled on to his side at the far edge of the bed taking up as little space as possible, a small human lying SIDEWAYS in the middle of the bed, and me with a terrible pain in my neck, my head resting at a most unnatural angle on the nightstand. Enough was enough. I was a resident at the time, completing my pediatric training, and sleep was hard to come by as it was. And she was getting ready to start KINDERGARTEN for criminy sake. We all needed some sleep. So, back to sleep training we went. Looking back, that was a trying, exhausting time.

Fast forward many years, and I find myself cherishing those times when she would crawl in to bed with us just to read before going to sleep, or ask to stay in my room and make it a “girls night”. I am also coming to the realization that I won’t get to drop her off at college and adjust to life without her at home just a single time, either. Like teaching her to sleep in her own bed, I will have to say goodbye to her over and over again, and in a slightly new way with new heartache each time. Each year comes with the aching feeling of knowing she is leaving again soon, somehow managing the excitement of this next new chapter in her life that she is thankfully so very ready for, along with the knowledge that my husband and I will never really be ready.

I remember when it dawned on me that for the very first time in her life, my daughter and I would have different addresses. We use to share the same physical space, we were an integral part of each other, somehow completely one and also separate; and now she would live in a different state, in a different building with people I didn’t even know. And for the first two years of college, we still claimed her attention during school breaks, relishing in the impromptu visit, the long Christmas holiday, Spring Break, and best of all, summer. Our address was still, in many ways, her primary address.

Until this year, junior year. Junior year is different. Junior year is living in an apartment. With her boyfriend. Junior year is knowing that now she has lived in this town for 2 full years, now school and friends, jobs and internships are a part of life, her life, the life she has built for herself. Now school breaks will be a little bit different. Junior year is knowing next summer, she won’t be moving back home.

So the adjustment this year is also different, and it is more final, and it is just as painful as the first time. More painful than waking up with your head on a nightstand. I am realizing as a parent, as a mother, that you don’t get use to the separation; it doesn’t really get easier. It just is.

And so, that is why I am writing. That is why I started a blog and bookmarked webpages on how to make a WordPress site, and decided to stop being an anonymous human being and start sharing. I did it in case anyone else is feeling the same way or asking the same questions. In case it makes anyone feel better. In case it makes me feel better.

I’m Becks, and this is midlife.