Parenting is the most important relationship. The most. There is so much more to risk than any other one. We are responsible for the children we turn out into the world. The emotional bandwidth to parent is exhausting. And amazing.
We are now empty nesters- and have been for a year. The adjustment is huge. Gone are the days of newborns, 2 and 4 year olds and navigating the hamster wheel of everyone's physical needs being met. Gone are the hot summers of three different soccer games and at least that many practices a week. Gone are the holiday concerts in crowded gyms and 7 am band practices. No longer do I spend a whole Saturday doing laundry for the week ahead.
Gone too, is my belief that I've got this as a parent. Because I never really did "have it." I now realize, as I try to gear down and adjust to the pace of being the three of us at home (Rob, myself and our geriatric Shetland Sheepdog, whom, I am not going to lie, we treat like a baby far too often) I never was able to stop and and really appreciate what it truly FELT like to parent 3 children 4 and under. Now that I can stop, it feels like a contradiction in living. I know I am running out of time. I know the biggest part of my life has been lived. I know that I have less life left than I did whilst on the hamster wheel of parenting. And it is scary. And wonderful. And such an adjustment.
The adjustment is magnified after the holidays once our children have come and gone again. We soak up every single second with them when they are home. I nuzzle the foreheads of my daughters, hold them to me every chance I get and am reaching up to wrap my arms around my 6ft 3 son on the daily. "Thank you" and "I love you" is said multiple times a day and I have been caught closing my eyes as I breathe in their amazingness more than once. I don't care how it looks, because the feeling I have captured in my nervous system of my children in my arms once again will sustain me as they carry on in their daily lives away from me.
As parents we must constantly adapt to the new beginnings, new adventures and new heartaches our children will traverse. We step back, watch them, love them from afar and adjust. We celebrate their accomplishments, gather them up and hold them close in their heartbreaks and we trust them. We trust that they've got this thing called life. We stop ourselves from projecting our insecurities upon them and continue to tell them how much we believe in them and that they know best about what is right for them. If they need us, we will always be here. We are constantly ensuring that their experience of "felt love" from us does not wane. We always want them to rest in our love knowing that it has never been conditional and never will be. No matter what, we will continue to parent them based on what they need, not what we think they need.
It's the pulling back that is the biggest adaptation. It's getting comfortable with not always doing- there are no more frenetic rhythms. There is no more "busyness" on a daily basis. And it feels good. It is time to recharge and really enjoy our next visit with them. It is planning major life events, going to grad school graduations and answering questions about life's next steps- all while denying that you need to be doing that for yourself too. Parenting is not at all about enjoying every single minute because "one day they won't be little anymore" and I would never tell anyone to enjoy every single minute. Because there are years that are hard. There are moments that break us and we never recover from- we learn to carry our grief. And it changes us. And we are back again, to the intense and amazing and ongoing adaptations that we must embrace- because parenting never ends. It is a relationship, after all and we too, as we age, must continue to grow, to understand ourselves on a whole different level and understand that as we raise our children, we raise ourselves. In all of the intensity and amazingness as well as the exhaustion.