As I mentioned at Back to School Night, my wife and I recently took our oldest son to college, and while we feel good that he’s happy in his new home, we can also acknowledge how much we miss him. Having worked with seniors and their parents for over 25 years, I was fully prepared for dropping our son off. Right?! Yes, it would be hard, but having spoken with many other parents over the years, I was aware of what was coming and believed I would handle it with relative ease. I could not have been more mistaken.
It was one thing to know beforehand that after we said goodbye, we would return to our house in Albuquerque, and life would go on. It was another thing entirely to watch him enter his dorm building and see the elevator doors close with him inside, while my wife, our younger son, and I remained outside on the sidewalk. It was at that moment we realized our lives would never again be the same. Similarly, we knew when we arrived home late the next night, his bedroom would be unoccupied; but the emptiness of it did not fully register until the next morning when I sat on his bed and looked around at the detritus of his life collected over the past few years.
As parents, we spend our time preparing our children to become independent, so we can “give them back to life.” We can take pride when our children reach this point, but it is a loss for us. Similarly, as educators, we spend the limited time we have with our students teaching them the skills they will need to go on to the next level. We help them learn how to read, write, do equations, and perform experiments. More than that, we try to teach them to think, to open their minds, to be critical, and to process all the information that comes flying at them. Much like the joy parents experience when we see our children do something well for the first time, we teachers are also viscerally moved when our students move to a higher level than before.
There’s a word in Yiddish, kvell, that might be loosely translated as “suffused with joy and pride.” It’s that emotion we experience when our children/our students surpass our wildest expectations, and we feel a warmth that permeates our bodies and our being. It’s the tears in the eyes and the beaming smile we see on the faces of parents and teachers at events like Senior Colloquium, when our soon-to-be graduates demonstrate the expertise they have gained in their chosen topics, the passion they have for their subjects, and the skills they have developed to express themselves publicly.
One of the cruel realities of both parenting and teaching is that the time we have with our children/our students is finite. While the influence we have on them may be enormous, the time we are allotted to teach them is ephemeral. For that reason, we need to take full advantage of it, be grateful that we have been given this opportunity, and realize that inevitably the time will come to let them go. As Blow says so eloquently about his own children, “They don’t belong to me; they’ve simply been entrusted to me. They are a gift life gave to me, but one that I must one day give back to life. They must grow up and go away and that is as it should be.”
