For 26 years I've been tripping on fat rubber snow boots and black leather Hush Puppies and cheap pink sandals and fuzzy blue slippers and baseball spikes and football cleats and high heels thinner than a No. 2 pencil and all manner of sneakers from those that light up to those that pump up to those with Velcro laces.
If it wasn't the heavy mud of the Red River Valley
When I walked into the house this week, no shoes lay strewn before me. The place where they had always been was bare.
For 26 years it has been you, me and them. Now it is only you and me. They are gone, and we are not 19 but 45.
Once parents, always parents, of course. There is no end ever to that condition. We could no more change that circumstance of our lives than change the color of the sky or the depth of the sea. It is an indelible state.
The emotional current that runs between parent and child eases once the child leaves home, however. Distance lightens the charge. No longer will we lie in bed peering into the black listening for the sound of the door. No more will we spend each day searching the recesses of their faces for signs of struggle. When the world rains on them, we will not witness it. We will be blind to their battles.
Still, we will forever feel for them: worry, joy, pain, pride. Their successes will be our successes, and their failures will be our failures, too.
Frankly, I'm not convinced 45 is old enough to be a parent. But 19 is entirely too young. We suspected that then. We know it now.
When I see teenage parents today, I say a prayer. Being a parent is the hardest thing I have ever done. Nothing else comes even close.
I, sad to say, did a so-so job of it. Mostly, I didn't listen well enough. That might seem like a modest mistake, but when the parent doesn't listen, the child eventually doesn't talk, and the consequences of that are dire: Questions do not get asked. Advice does not get sought. Fears and dreams do not get shared.
You, though, were fantastic. Really. You were the Michael Phelps of motherhood. Some people have a knack for certain things. Yours is being a mom. You always said what should have been said, did what should have been done. You brought reason where I brought ignorance. If you don't believe me, I have three witnesses willing to testify.
When we were 19, we never imagined this day coming. It never entered our thoughts, and even if we had somehow bothered to search for it, we would not have been able to see it. It was beyond the horizon.
Time is an excellent courier, however. He never misses a delivery. His infallibility, frankly, is annoying.
So here we are only days after the final child left for college and a life of her own, and in the quiet moments the question each of us mulls is this: So what do we do now? There is as much life behind us as ahead. Maybe more. Nor are we the same people we once were. We are less rash. But also less daring. What we have gained in awareness we have lost in the ability to act without the paralysis of undue concern.
"That age is best which is the first, when youth and blood are warmer; But being spent, the worse, and worst times still succeed the former." The English poet Robert Herrick found growing old of little good. You and I are more forgiving. To be young, however, is to be untempered. It is perhaps what I envy most about youth and wish now came bottled so we could refill what leaked all those years.
It is no exaggeration to say parenting consumed us. It devoured each day, and if we weren't fixing someone, we were fixing something the someones had broken. It was like living at a demolition derby or in a house full of eagles.
Their exit means we'll spend less time remedying wounds be they to people or plaster. Yet it also leaves behind emptiness too big, it seems, for gentle conversation and the scrape of silverware to possibly ever fill.
We are not in uncharted waters. In deference to another poet – this one the American Robert Frost – the road we are on is trodden black. If we were to look around, in fact, we would see we are part of a great march.
It is a shared experience most of us wish we could do again. But there is no turning back, and much like the place we have been, I suspect the place we are going at times is not easy traveling. You and I will have to pick our way as best we can.
What else is new.