I can count on two hands, maybe even a hand and a half, the number of times in my adult life that I've cried so hard I couldn't function. I tear up pretty easily, mostly when I am made aware of the presence of God in my life, but I am very rarely brought to the kind of gut-wrenching sobs that leave you temporarily incapable of participating in the world. The most inopportune incident of this kind came when I was in a movie theater by myself with six young children, including a toddler on my lap, watching the movie Up and crying so loudly that I scared everyone in the room, including myself.
But the profound weeping incident I'm remembering this week was one from September 2015. I had just dropped my oldest daughter off at Mountain Lab, a somewhat mandatory "team-building" overnight camp for her eighth-grade class. She had been to camp once before, and it had not been a huge success. There are kids who love camp and kids who don't, and she definitely fell into the latter category. She had also been struggling with friendships the past three years. She didn't feel like she had any reliable, go-to friends at the time. She dreaded being with 200 classmates day and night for two days, trying to find a place to sit in a rowdy dining hall, and being forced to do trust-building activities with people she knew she didn't trust. The thought of Mountain Lab had haunted her all summer, and now it was time to drop her off to face her worst fears.
As I pulled away from the campground, the tears started rolling. By the time I got to the highway entrance, I was in the full-blown emotional upheaval that's usually reserved for sudden deaths. I had to pull off the road. There I sat for several long minutes, weeping from the core of my being. I trusted that God was with her and would use this for her good, but I hurt for how I knew she must feel. I had always felt like this child in particular, out of all my kids, took my heart with her wherever she went. She was my sensitive kid. Her pain was my pain in a way I didn't experience with my others. I remember wondering, as I sat on the shoulder of the highway desperately trying to find something on which to blow my nose, how I would ever be able to send this girl to college.
That question lingered in my mind the past five years, until it was answered on Monday. That's when we left her 800 miles from home for the next three months. As I hugged her goodbye, the tears, sweet and subdued, came for a couple of minutes. Honestly, they were tears of joy every bit as much as they were tears of sadness. This girl is going to be just fine. My hunch is that she's going to be great.
My parenting mantra that I've said at least a hundred times: Maturity is a parent's best friend. Those problems you're having with your kid today? Those chronic irritations you notice again and again in your child? Maturity will take care of nearly all of them. Our job is to pray, be consistent, stay engaged and available, love and love some more, trust God, and let His gift of maturity do its good work.
If you are the parent of younger kids, take heart! Have hope! Right under your nose, maturity is doing its work in those kids of yours. It won't always be pretty, but on the other side, it will be worth every sob session you've ever had.
And if you have kids nearing high school graduation whose maturity is starting to cast a nice, warm glow in your house, and if you're starting to mourn their imminent departure, be encouraged by this: In my experience, the buildup to the goodbye is much worse than the actual goodbye. We spend their whole senior year dreading what turns out to be a pretty beautiful thing. The two times I've dropped kids off at far-away colleges, my sense of excitement for them has outweighed the sense of loss for myself.
If I ever wonder about the goodness of God, all I have to do is think of the work He's done in my kids. A shy, scared 13-year-old somehow becomes an 18-year-old who is eager and equipped to live 800 miles from home with 20,000 strangers. That makes me cry. In the best possible way.
