Letting her go

Please send your resume if you are interested in the following position:

Seeking a caretaker of a small person who requires 24-hour attention. Picture the vigilance the Secret Service would employ if the president decided to catch the playoff game between the Tripoli Traitors and the Taliban Terrorists on an Islamabad soccer field surrounded by land mines, and then double it.

Looking for responsible adults open to an 18-year-to-life commitment without the possibility of parole. Must be willing to forgo all luxuries as this position does not pay a dime, but rather requires you to pay tens of thousands of dollars in expenses.

For the sake of full disclosure, we should inform you that just when this mini person finally gets to a place where she can sort of take care of herself and morphs into someone with whom you wouldn’t mind having lunch, she will leave you.

Any takers?

I accepted the position described above in 1994, naïve about the true nature of the job. But now that my daughter is entering her final year of high school, I am standing on the precipice of a nest that won’t be completely empty (my son will be starting eighth grade), but it will certainly be far roomier.

Because my daughter will be packing for a distant college in the not-too-distant future, I watched with great interest a recent HBO special called “The Kids Grow Up” by documentary filmmaker Doug Block. The film captures Block’s emotional journey through daughter Lucy’s last year of high school, culminating with the day Block and his wife leave her at a college dormitory 3,000 miles away.

The filmmaker begins the film by stating the obvious: “While there is a lot of help available with raising a child, there is nothing that prepares you for letting her go.”

The film is interesting because, as you can imagine, there is a ton of footage of a young, chatty Lucy who initially loves being filmed “so she can see herself on TV.” But as her father and his camera continue to intrude on her life as she grows up — “Lucy, what will the guy you are going to marry be like?” “I don’t know, Dad; I’m only 10,” — Block becomes as unwanted as a stalker.

Block rationalizes his paparazzi-like hovering by assuring an obviously dismayed Lucy that the short-term cost will be far outweighed by the long-term reward of “memories that last a lifetime.” Watching the film, you begin to think that when it comes to living life in the spotlight, Britney has it easy.

Although Lucy’s privacy is sacrificed in the process, we voyeurs watching the film can commiserate with Block’s search for a satisfying answer to a seemingly unanswerable question: “Why do we bring them up if it is only to let them go?” The filmmaker goes from parent to parent, earnestly hunting for some cosmic meaning to this reality of parenthood, only to find that other parents are as lost as he is. 

One father says, “What is it like to be facing an empty nest? I just want to rewind and go back to fourth grade.” Another father laments, “I’m trying to be stoic about it, but basically I’m traumatized. What will life be like without kids in the house? What will fill the vacuum?”

But it is Block’s aging father who provides what proves to be the most insightful response.

Block: Dad, what was it like after your three kids left the house?

Dad: What was it like? It was hell.

Block: So what advice do you have for me?

Dad: I have no advice at all.

I tuned into the program because I thought it would help with my own trepidation, which grows with each passing month. The trepidation is 50 percent sheer panic and 50 percent what can only be described as “anticipatory grief.”

The panic makes sense: I doubt there is a parent on the planet who watches his teenager walk out the door and doesn’t wonder if she’s been taught everything she needs to know to navigate the messiness of life. But what about the grief? Shouldn’t there be some relief in knowing that the sleep-till-noon, sloppy procrastinator who is more interested in Facebook friend No. 611 and the sale at Nordstrom than in you will be living elsewhere? There should be … but there isn’t.

So, then, why do we do it? Why do we opt to become parents when we know the last chapter is fraught with pain?

We do it because in a life full of interesting options, there is hardly anything as interesting as watching a baby become a person. We do it because when we calculate the joy against the heartache, it seems like a fair trade. And we do it simply because we are wired that way. Just like a bird instinctively builds a nest, feeds her offspring, teaches them how to fly and then pushes them out of the nest so that they can repeat the cycle, we are programmed to do the same.

Although, there is one major difference between the birds and we humans. When it’s time for us to push them out of the nest, it hurts like hell.