That moment... Twice

I don’t remember the exact circumstances, but the emotion. I remember trying to live my young twenty something adult life and having a thought to myself… something about shopping at a store, or paying bills, or mowing my own grass. There in that otherwise mundane event it hit me like a ton of bricks. “My parents were right after all.” I was making some of the same observations my parents had made, that I used to roll my eyes at. But they were right. And in a moment, all those little life observations and lessons they’d given me ran through my head. “They were right after all… about it all.”I can’t say that I cried, but I remember sitting down, and staring at the ground for a few minutes. I understood my parents better, appreciated them more, and looked at them differently from there on out. To be honest, I think I viewed this as a rite of passage into adulthood. Perhaps it was.I’m now a 46 year old dad of a teenage girl. That means that I have some good moments with my daughter, but I also get snarky comments, disrespect, and drama (MY GOD, THE DRAMA). To be fair, my daughter is overall a good kid. She’s got straight A’s, volunteers in the community and in her church. She struggles a little with money management, but is getting better all the time. She’s loyal, caring, and beautiful inside and out. But when it’s rough sailing with her, and it often is… I look back fondly at THAT MOMENT I remember pretty vividly, smirking that her moment is coming. And I know I should judge her more by how she behaves outside the house than inside the house. The snarky disrespect is just a natural result of her instinct to leave the nest.In the last 12-18 months, I’ve been building up to another moment. Every day my daughter gets older, more independent, and sure enough, a bit wiser. She’s overcome some especially difficult events in her young life, and she has a good group of friends at school and church. She goes out and has fun with them, and spends less time with her parents. This is natural, expected, and… painful. There’s nothing harder than letting them go. We still have a couple years of high school left, but the day is coming when we drop her off at college. She’s leaving our nest soon. And I think about my parents. How hard it must have been for them.We give everything for our kids, all that we have. We’re never perfect, but we do what we can, to the best of our abilities, and we watch them grow, and stumble, and flap their wings. And they will leave. I know THAT MOMENT is coming again, and it will hurt more than the first. And I will cry. via /r/Parenting http://ift.tt/2aLWBmd