Since many of of us will be saying goodbye this month to our children off to college, I thought I’d seek out recommendations of well written pieces from a parent’s perspective.
I’ll start with these two:
Saying goodbye to my child, the youngster by Michael Gerson
Unprepared
I love Beverly Beckham‘s essay in the Boston Globe from years ago…
The article is paywalled now. I had saved the content…
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I was the sun and the kids were my planets
By Beverly Beckham
Updated August 31, 2022, 2:21 p.m.
I wasn’t wrong about their leaving. My husband kept telling me I was. That it wasn’t the end of the world when first one child, then another, and then the last packed their bags and left for college.
But it was the end of something. “Can you pick me up, Mom?” “What’s for dinner?” “What do you think?”
I was the sun and they were the planets. And there was life on those planets, whirling, non-stop plans and parties and friends coming and going, and ideas and dreams and the phone ringing and doors slamming.
And I got to beam down on them. To watch. To glow.
And then they were gone, one after the other.
“They’ll be back,” my husband said. And he was right. They came back. But he was wrong, too, because they came back for intervals — not for always, not planets anymore, making their predictable orbits, but unpredictable, like shooting stars.
Always is what you miss. Always knowing where they are. At school. At play practice. At a ballgame. At a friend’s. Always looking at the clock midday and anticipating the door opening, the sigh, the smile, the laugh, the shrug. “How was school?” answered for years in too much detail. “And then he said . . . and then I said to him. . . .”
Then hardly answered at all.
Always, knowing his friends.
Her favorite show.
What he had for breakfast.
What she wore to school.
What he thinks.
How she feels.
My friend’s twin girls left for Roger Williams yesterday. They are her fourth and fifth children. She’s been down this road three times before. You’d think it would get easier. “I don’t know what I’m going to do without them,” she has said every day for months.
And I have said nothing, because, really, what is there to say?
A chapter ends. Another chapter begins. One door closes and another door opens. The best thing a parent can give their child is wings. I read all these things when my children left home and thought then what I think now: What do these words mean?
Eighteen years isn’t a chapter in anyone’s life. It’s a whole book, and that book is ending and what comes next is connected to, but different from, everything that has gone before.
Before was an infant, a toddler, a child, a teenager. Before was feeding and changing and teaching and comforting and guiding and disciplining, everything hands-on.
Now?
Now the kids are young adults and on their own and the parents are on the periphery, and it’s not just a chapter change. It’s a sea change.
As for a door closing? Would that you could close a door and forget for even a minute your children and your love for them and your fear for them, too. And would that they occupied just a single room in your head. But they’re in every room in your head and in your heart.
As for the wings analogy? It’s sweet. But children are not birds. Parents don’t let them go and build another nest and have all new offspring next year.
Saying goodbye to your children and their childhood is much harder than all the pithy sayings make it seem. Because that’s what going to college is. It’s goodbye.
It’s not a death. And it’s not a tragedy.
But it’s not nothing, either.
To grow a child, a body changes. It needs more sleep. It rejects food it used to like. It expands and it adapts.
To let go of a child, a body changes, too. It sighs and it cries and it feels weightless and heavy at the same time.
The drive home alone without them is the worst. And the first few days.
But then it gets better. The kids call, come home, bring their friends, fill the house with their energy again.
Life does go on.
“Can you give me a ride to the mall?” “Mom, make him stop!” I don’t miss this part of parenting, playing chauffeur and referee.
But I miss them, still, all these years later, the children they were, at the dinner table, beside me on the couch, talking on the phone, sleeping in their rooms.
Safe.
Home.
Mine.
What a wonderful piece! Thank you for sharing!
It’s also on Beverly Beckham’s own website w/o a paywall:
Here’s another that I had filed away when my kids were little. From Bill Bryson’s I’m a Stranger Here Myself, his essay On Losing a Son (to College):
And this one from Eliza Van Cort:
Wow, so much heavy truth in these essays with my youngest leaving in a few days. Loved the Gerson and Bryson pieces which especially hit hard.
I have trouble getting though this one without tearing up.
Totally agree! Same here.
Love this poem from Cecil Day Lewis
It is eighteen years ago, almost to the day -
A sunny day with leaves just turning,
The touch-lines new-ruled - since I watched you play
Your first game of football, then, like a satellite
Wrenched from its orbit, go drifting away
Behind a scatter of boys. I can see
You walking away from me towards the school
With the pathos of a half-fledged thing set free
Into a wilderness, the gait of one
Who finds no path where the path should be.
That hesitant figure, eddying away
Like a winged seed loosened from its parent stem,
Has something I never quite grasp to convey
About nature’s give-and-take - the small, the scorching
Ordeals which fire one’s irresolute clay.
I have had worse partings, but none that so
Gnaws at my mind still. Perhaps it is roughly
Saying what God alone could perfectly show -
How selfhood begins with a walking away,
And love is proved in the letting go.
Bryson is a fab writer. He hits home.
But hopefully your kid does return to you. As an adult whom you relate to as another adult and just not “your kid”. Best ever.
I read this one the same month my older daughter went off to college 1000 miles away 
I don’t have an essay… but the book “Letting Go” is fabulous.
It’s even harder to let them go at 14. Ask me how I know. Every year on the prep forum, we console each other about this choice to allow our children to leave so early. I’ve posted about this “loss” many times, but here and here sum it up.
Hugs to all of you who are anticipating this separation for the first time.
I’m teary eyed reading this thread. I actually cried at the end of every summer vacation when my kids were in school. They’d get in the bus and I’d go inside and bawl my eyes out.
Here’s another heart-tugger written by novelist Elisabeth Egan for her daughter: