Bye, Bye, Bruv

Hello and welcome to a post-Friday-the-13th Saturday here at the Wannaskan Almanac. Today is September 14th.

Yesterday my husband set off, the early morning sunshine glinting off our white, rusty Subaru Legacy, to take College Kid 3.0 to school. It's official. It happened.

The 7th Grader has been asking all summer if she can have her brother's room when he leaves. The answer has been a consistent staccato of no. Not even five minutes after he left, she asked, "Can I have his bedroom?" No. And a half hour later, "Can I have his bedroom?"

Moments after the car pulled away, the 4th Grader started to choke up and then the tears came. "Who's going to play Borderlands with me?" he asked. He shouldn't be playing Borderlands at all, I thought, but that wasn't the point. The point was he felt the sharpness of being left behind. "Someday I'm going to be an only child," he said. He's not wrong, I thought.

I had my cry Thursday morning as I prepared my coffee after a terrifying dream with the message: If you don't take care of your children, they will die. I'll spare you the gruesome details. Between the coffee, the dream, and my son working nights (meaning I rarely see him during the work week) the finality of his departure hit me. The invisible hands of this reality squeezed my throat and whispered above my Moka pot, "You won't be seeing him anymore. He leaves tomorrow morning. This is it."

As parents, we've been counting down the days. Our son is mature and ready to go off to college. He's taken care of his own immunizations, health forms, health insurance, financial aid, tuition bills, housing, other required training and paperwork, scheduling his classes, lining up what he needs for school, and packing his stuff all on his own. He has been shedding the sense of responsibility he used to feel as part of our household like a snake sloughing its skin. Mounds of clothing on his bedroom floor, socks littered here and there, crusty dishes left on the counter, his computer a permanent fixture at one end of the kitchen table, eating the last of everything. It's like he's both been here and not. Good riddance to that, right?

But the emotion that hit me Thursday morning gave me a different perspective and asked me a different question. What am I going to do without him? 

College Kid 3.0 is the one I call my golden retriever. He has this bounce in his step and a cheerful energy that makes him sincere and earnest. If you threw him a stick, he would gladly fetch it and ask to do it again. He's loving, loyal, and reliable. He's the kid I found myself counting on the most. Pick up your siblings, drop off your siblings, please run this errand, please help me with that project. That's not to say the other children lack these qualities. It's just that this kid is unusually bright and happy to help.

On one of my Facebook Reels rabbit holes, I watched a video where a clinical psychologist talks about the detriment parents can cause when they focus on the pursuit of happiness. According to her, the pursuit of happiness becomes an extra layer of parental expectation that leads to anxiety. The kid doesn't want to disappoint. Instead, she says, aim for emotional regulation. Teach your child that it's okay to experience all of the emotions of the human experience and that "happy" isn't the end-all-be-all goal.

Had I pushed my kids toward the pursuit of happiness?

What came to mind were some of the mom sayings I've amassed over the years.

• "Do it nice, or do it twice." (Credit here to Mrs. Rachuy at Warroad Elementary.)
• "Mistakes are part of learning."
• "Stupid is as stupid does." (Forrest Gump)
• "You can do hard things."

The questions we have asked our kids.

• What are your strengths?
• What are your values?
• What do you like about yourself?
• How do you want to show up in the world?
• What do you want your contribution to the world to be?
• How many times have I told you...?

This morning, I asked the 7th Grader, "What do you think we, your parents, want for you: to be happy or to know how to emotionally regulate so you can the experience the entire range of human emotions?"

"Both," she said. "You and Tata want us to feel the joy of doing something."

I hadn't thought of that.

As my husband and son drive cross country to his next adventure (they grilled meat in the parking lot of a shady Red Roof Inn in Chicago last night), I hope that what we have taught our children is that channeling their earnestness and curiosity to find out who they are, and to align that knowing with showing up in the world in meaningful ways, will lead to that feeling of joy, and ultimately, happiness.