Letting Them Go

This post is from Lincoln's dad, Sam.

The other day I was getting the weekly groceries for my family. The woman behind the checkout had rung in my groceries dozens of times before. She loves Nico and Linc. They would always have conversations and flirt the whole time she would check us out. When she rang in my beer that day she casually asked me for my ID. Unlike many other people, I am not offended by this. I too am in the service industry and I’m fully aware that this is the law. The manager who had come over to help bag my groceries laughed however, and asked the woman how she didn’t recognize me since I was in there every week.

The checkout woman looked me in the face, a face she had seen dozens of times before and there was not even a spark of recognition in her eyes. She had no idea we’d ever interacted before. Again, I was not particularly offended by this. As a waiter, I too see hundreds of people a week and have a very hard time recognizing return customers. What was interesting was her reaction when the manager helpfully reminded the checkout woman that I usually had two boys with me.

She looked at me again and then looked down where Lincoln and Nico would normally be. We both realized that this was the first time that she had checked me out since both boys were in school. Recognition slowly dawned on her face as it split into a big smile.

“Oh, yeah…” she chuckled. “Where are my boys today?” Not ‘your’ boys mind you, “MY boys,” she’d said.

“They both started school,” I explained. “I finally get to do this grocery shopping thing solo now.”

“Oh,” she replied. “Well… that must be nice.” I couldn’t help but notice the subtle disappointment in her voice.

“Yeah... Nice,” echoed the manager with a suspiciously similar tone.

What they meant was, “That must be nice for you to no longer have to deal with herding a couple of preschool kids while you go about your daily chores but… what about us? What about everyone else that got to interact with Linc and Nico everywhere you had to take them before their school years started? What about the rest of the world? Those two were bright spots in our day. We all liked those two little guys but now we are stuck with just lame old you, and you are not nearly as cute.”

Again, I was not offended at all. In fact, I realized that I completely agreed with them.

I have to admit that as I pushed that cart to my car, a part of me was seriously considering home school. I wanted to go snatch both my sons out of their school building right that instant. Not from some noble or selfless sense that I could sacrifice my time and interests to educate them better than their teachers, but because I just wanted to go show them off out there in the world, to show people all their charms and let them run free where everyone could enjoy them and fall in love with them.

It just feels so wrong to watch your little kids walk down those long hallways to classes; to just let go of them like that. It feels like an abdication of responsibility, like a betrayal of trust. And, that day, it also felt like denying them access to the broader world, the world of checkout women who love to flirt with them, of toy store employees who love to play with them, of book store stockers who ohh and ahh at them reading together in the mornings. It feels like I was gifted with these bright lights to share with the world but now I am being forced to hide them away, depriving the world of the joy they bring.

But that’s not the truth.

That’s just the way it feels to loving and proud parents.

Yes, letting go is hard, but the truth is that letting my boys go is, in fact, what gives them to the world.

Every day that my sons go to school or to church or to summer camp without me is an opportunity for them to share themselves with the world in their own ways. Every lesson they learn on their own is one step farther down the path of their own lives. It is what makes them who they are, or at least who they will be.

The strictly biological purpose of all life (not the philosophical purpose; I’m not getting into that today) is simply to create more life, to continue; and then to release that life into the world. That cannot happen if I hold on to my kids anymore than it could were a mockingbird to refuse to let her chicks try to fly out of their nest.

I have to let them go out and become a part of the world. Even when it’s so hard, and there is no guarantee that the world will accept them. Even when one of them has an extra chromosome.

We have to trust our children. After all, they trust us implicitly. We have to fight our selfish doubts and argue against our fears. We have to force ourselves to let them fly.

It’s what they were born to do. It’s what we were all born to do.

 So, I’ll let them go.

I’ll send them to school on their own.

I’ll try to encourage them to push the boundaries that the world and I have created.

I will let them fly.

And I guess the checkout woman at the grocery store will just have to remember me because I am charming and fun, not because my kids are. I mean, I am pretty damn charming when I want to be. After all, my own mother encouraged me to fly so that she could share me with the world too. But someday soon, Lincoln will be at his local grocery store on his own, and he will be just as charming and funny as I am, and he will be just as memorable as well.

And he will be all of those things because Liz and I let him go.