Practicing Goodbye

She walks out the front door like a new recruit headed to her first Army assignment. With a sleeping bag in one hand and a gym bag in the other, she shouts out, "I love leaving the house with bags in my arms!" When I ask her why, she says, "Because I love going!"

She's 11, and she doesn't care where she's going. She just wants to go already.

I have written before about how different my third child is from my others. This one has two speeds: 0 and 100. Home is a place to crash, and the world is a place to conquer. This week she's conquering summer camp. While the other campers navigate the campground with their parents and many offer tear-filled goodbyes, Brooka has no time for such things. There's adventure to be found. That, and she's never been one for long goodbyes.

From her very earliest days, she shooed me away. As a small toddler, she would yell, "GO!" when I dropped her off in the church nursery. This was new territory for me. My oldest had screamed for his life when I attempted to leave him in the nursery. This would continue until he was 2 1/2 and we found a nursery worker who encouraged him to bring along his Pooh Bear, for whom she had set up a special spot at the table, complete with Pooh's own Dixie cup and graham crackers. My next oldest just pouted in the corner by herself the whole time and punished me later with her silence. Then came my third, who literally pushed me out the door and lit up the room with her smile when I was out of sight. This was the first of my practice goodbyes with Brooka.

Before she started preschool, I thought I would have to duct tape her to her carseat when we dropped the older kids off at school, so desperate was her desire to escape the van and follow them in. When her first day of preschool finally came, her eye was swollen shut, the result of a mosquito bite gone bad. She looked terrible, but there was no holding her back. She marched in the classroom without a backward glance, leaving me to dab my eyes alone in the hallway. We repeated this scene again in kindergarten, minus the swollen eye. I could expect a quick hug, but if I held on for an extra second, the push would come and off she'd go, never looking back.

So it's no surprise that this is the child who lives for her time away at summer camp (and winter camp), the one who has no patience for a long goodbye. I think about the goodbyes that are to come. No doubt she'll spend summers as a camp counselor as soon as they'll let her. I can't imagine a Brooka-less summer, but probably it will be here before I know it. She's saving up her money for her first overseas trip, and unless I save up my money, too, that will entail a tearful goodbye, at least on my part. One day she'll leave for college, or for somewhere, and I'll realize that our house is now only the place she'll come to visit. Surely that will be the hardest goodbye of all.

But I'm thankful I get to practice at it first. Every time she leaves, I get a little more brave. I'm a little bit more like my own mother, who dropped me off at a college in California she knew nothing about with people she'd never met. Newly widowed and returning to a completely empty house for the first time in her life, she held me in the parking lot and let me sob, and then she smiled and bravely left. That's the kind of goodbye mom I want to be, the mom who believes in her child a ridiculous amount, who says, "I know you'll do great," and who walks away with a smile, then falls on her prayerful knees the minute she walks in the door.