"You're off to great places, today is your day. Your mountain is waiting so...get on your way" (Dr. Seuss").
So off they go again...Noah to 4th grade and Leah to 2nd. I'm a one sad mama today. Every year at this time when the kids go back to school, it's hard for me to say bye to them. I get a little melancholic and start thinking ahead of the time, my imagination running rampant as I keep visualizing the impending day when my kids graduate from high school and move away...and I am left alone.
I cannot imagine myself being anything other then their mama. What is going to happen to me when they no longer need me? Who will I be without taking care of them? Obviously I haven't figured that one out yet and every time I think of it, I feel a wave of uncomfortable emotions washing all over me.
Today I got up super early, made a breakfast and lunch for my babies, lit up our porch lights and then we sat there quietly by the candlelight and ate our breakfast (It was actually Noah who requested that we light the candle Leah has brought me as a gift from Cayman Islands earlier this summer). Afterwards, the three of us walked downstairs to our bus stop conveniently located across the street from our house. We could see from a distance that all the kids from our street were already there and few minutes later the yellow bus arrived. I kissed the children goodbyes and I love you's and I watched them disappearing into the bus, into their new big adventure, into their new lives. I stood there on a street until the bus made a u-turn and I wave to the kids one last time and I watched the bus slowly driving away. Sudden wave of sadness flashed through my body. Will this ever get better?
As a way of dealing with this particular issue, I even thought of homeschooling the children. Putting my life of hold for them seemed like a perfect sacrifice for me worthy of undertaking. Over the last year, I have spent numerable days fantasizing about homeschooling and offering the kids the gift of education different from the public school system. I went over different teaching curriculums and even set on a one I liked the most. I wanted to be the best mom I can be and that in my opinion included the homeschooling. Studies show that kids who are home schooled perform better on standardized tests, excel in college and become successful, self-directed learners. All this sounds great but the only problem is that my kids do not want to be home schooled. To be more specific, Noah is the one who is strongly against it. He says he likes his friends and doesn't want to become antisocial like me! I tried to talk to him about it many times, explaining that there is absolutely no truth to the accusation that homeschooling harms children socially but so far he is not interested in it at all. I keep hoping that by the time he finishes the elementary school, he will change his mind. I find all the social statistics on school culture concerning drinking, drugs, sex and violence very alarming.
The truth is that I also want to spend more time with the children before they are too grown up and no longer have a desire to hang out with their mama. I want to bottle them up so no one could ever hurt them. Like all bottles, they are fragile and would easily break if dropped a few feet from the ground so I just want to protect them. But deep down I know that their future pain is inevitable and that it will not be my failure. Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh once said: " No Mud, No Lotus", which means that the mud allows us the opportunity for growth and transformation. The mud doesn't smell good but the lotus flower does-if there is no mud, there is also no lotus flower. It is the same with our emotions. If we can't experience suffering, we will never be able to experience true joy.
More than anything, I want for my kids to grow into a kind, brave and resilient human beings but they won't develop these warrior qualities by playing small and safe in the world. These qualities are created through pain, struggle and suffering. The most brave and resilient people I know are those who have overcame extreme pain and adversity and converted their suffering to a blessing they later used to their advantage. Gandhi once said that "It's a privilege to have lived a difficult life".
Am I trying to protect the children from the one thing that could make them more resilient and alive? Glennon Doyle have said that "Maybe our job as parents is not to protect our kids from pain, but to hold their hands and walk into their pain with them". What a revolutionary statement that is. I need to remember this.
